Holy Week - Good Friday 2025

 "It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.  Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.

The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, “Surely this was a righteous man.” When all the people who had gathered to witness this sight saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away.  But all those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.
The Burial of Jesus

Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council, a good and upright man, who had not consented to their decision and action. He came from the Judean town of Arimathea, and he himself was waiting for the kingdom of God.  Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body.  Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid.  It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin.

The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it.  Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment."

Luke 23: 44b-56

Today, for those of faith, represents both the darkest day in human history and the day where our freedom was born, though hard to see at the time.  

This was the day where it seemed all hope died.  Good Friday remembers the day when Jesus Christ, Son of God, was crucified by the Roman government and died a criminal's death.

He suffered through the mockery of a trial, in which the prosecution presented trumped up charges to a judge who found no fault but still sided with the mob and gave into their demands.  He was beaten, tortured, and jeered.  Stripped and dressed in a costume designed to mock the charges against him.  He was forced to carry the beam of his cross in a walk of shame through the city where the same people who cheered his arrival now gawked at the parade of criminals as they worked their way to the site of their execution.  He was then nailed to that beam, in both his hands and feet, raised between two criminals and left to die.

Crucifixion was one of the most cruel forms of death that humans have ever created.  It was public and designed to dissuade its witnesses from perpetrating similar crimes.  Victims were sometimes left on display after death as a warning to any other potential criminals.  The death it provided was particularly slow and painful, leading to the term excruciating, or literally "out of crucifying."  The person executed was usually attached to the cross by a range of methods including rope and nails.  The executed could be tied to the cross such that the ropes would cut into his skin.  To support the weight of a body, nails would be driven into the arm just above the wrist, between the two bones of the forearm.  Nails would also be driven into the feet, also to support the weight of the body, usually without the foot-rest or the seat that is placed on our decorative crosses.  The entire weight of the body would be placed on those nails as the body would continue to pull downward in gravity, keeping the person in continual pain.

When the whole body weight was supported by stretched out arms, nailed to that cross, the typical cause of death was asphyxiation.  The executed would have severe difficulty inhaling and would have to draw themselves up by the arms, leading to exhaustion and pain at the nail sites.  This process could be sped up by the soldiers breaking the condemned's legs, preventing them from pushing up, leaving them to die choking for air.  The executed could further suffer cardiac rupture, heart failure, hypovolemic shock, sepsis, acidosis, arrhythmia, and pulmonary embolism.  The scourging before the crucifixion would exacerbate the potential for sepsis.  Add in dehydration and you have a slow, agonizing death on display for all to see.

And Jesus willingly chose that path.  He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, willingly going to cross to redeem his creation.

To his followers, this day marked a feeling of hopelessness.  It was the day hope died.  Their hope in change for the future.  The possible hope for revolution.  They saw everything they had hoped for vanishing in an instant.

They would abandon Him, they would deny Him, they would run away.

For Jesus, this was also an unprecedented day.  The day when Jesus, the pure, spotless lamb would bear the sins of the world, past, present, and future.  It would be the one time Jesus was completely separated from His Father.  Where God would turn His back on him, for he could not see his son stained with sin.  Eloi; Eloi; Lama; Sabachtha.  My God; My God; Why have you forsaken me?

The first time Jesus experienced despair.

Many of us today on this Good Friday might be experiencing despair.  Might be feeling hopeless.  The physical isolation.  The loss of a job.  The loss of income.  This might indeed be the darkest night.

But we - we know dawn is coming.  We celebrate that Friday is not the end of the story.  Things may look at their absolute darkest, but morning is coming.  Friday may be death, but Sunday is resurrection.

This is where our freedom begins.  Bought with blood, the cost fully paid.

No matter the outlook, it gets better.

It's Friday, but Sunday is coming!

Praise the Lord!

Today He who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the Cross.

He who is King of the angels is arrayed in a crown of thorns.

He who wraps the Heavens in clouds is wrapped in the purple of mockery.

He who in Jordan set Adam free receives blows upon His face.

The Bridegroom of the Church is transfixed with nails.

The Son of the Virgin is pierced with a spear.

We venerate Thy Passion, O Chris.

Show us also Thy glorious Resurrection.

Held

"I thought I was called to challenge the atheists, but the atheists ended up challenging me.  I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight.  Instead God used gay people to show me how to be Christian."

Rachel Held Evans, 2016

The Christian community is morning the loss of progressive Christian blogger and author Rachel Held Evans, who died Saturday May 4, 2019 at the age of 37.  She died from a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics that had been administered for a combination of the flu and an infection.  She developed seizures, and was put in a medically induced coma, from which she was not able to recover.  Her death has been a shock to her friends and family as well as the many who follow her blog and read her books, and to the broader Christian community as a whole.

In the days following her death, testimonies poured out from across the spiritual spectrum, reflecting on what an impact her ministry had.  And all of it centered on the brutal honesty and truthfulness from which she spoke.  She highlighted the difficulties that exist for a woman in a theological landscape dominated (and often fiercely gatekeepered) by men.  She fought back against the notion that questioning one's theological elders means defying God or "backsliding" into atheism.  She wrote unflinchingly about how hard it can be to trust God, to forgive church leaders, particularly in light of some of the horrific abuses we have heard of, and how to wrestle with Scripture.  Hers was a real and genuine life that reminds us that faith is often messy and complicated.

From her work, we can see a faith that should be more interested in the questions than the answers.  In living in the questions, instead of having to have "the" answer.  A faith that is continually seeking.  That is questioning and not just taking things that are told to you.  That seeks to learn more, to grow more, to understand more.

To become more gracious, more kind, more understanding.  More patient.  More loving.  More merciful.

That opens itself to outsiders.  To the excluded.  To the hurting.  To the broken.  Particularly those that the church has traditionally shunned or ignored.

And her faith wasn't afraid to step outside the bounds that the Christian community has traditionally drawn for itself.  She wrote about being pro-life but voting for Hilary Clinton because she believed the Democratic party created progressive social policies that make health and child care more affordable, contraception more accessible, alleviate poverty and support a living wage, resulting in driving down abortion rates.

She called out churches for trying to make church "cool" to appeal to the new kids.  "For a generation bombarded with advertising and sales pitches, and for whom the charge of 'inauthentic' is as cutting an insult as any, church rebranding efforts can actually backfire, especially when young people sense that there is more emphasis on marketing Jesus than actually following Him."

She was a progressive Christian writer who found her faith again in the traditions of the sacraments and liturgy.  

Somewhat beautifully, her last post before becoming ill was about Ash Wednesday, Lent, and an acceptance of death.  

"It strikes me today as the liturgy of Ash Wednesday teaches something that nearly everyone can agree on.  Whether you are part of a church or not, whether you believe today or your doubt, whether you are a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic or a so-called "none" (whose faith experiences far transcend the limits of that label) you know this truth deep in your bones: "Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.

Death is a part of life.

My prayer for you this season is that you make time to celebrate that reality, and to grieve that reality, and that you will know you are not alone.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

In a perspective piece in the Washington Post, a colleague noted this as the true arc of Christianity; "that death comes before life, that doubt comes before belief, that the gospel of Jesus comes to us in a world sick with pain, loss, brokenness, and, as we know too well, senseless death."

But we also know the beauty that such darkness gives way to light.  That pain gives way to healing.  That brokenness can lead to repair.  

That the product of our faith is restoration.  So long as we keep seeking, keep questioning, keep learning, keep loving, keep growing and deepening in it.  

I pray her life, her death, and her message remind us of that.