He’s Dead – Face It!

It may seem fake, if not futile to drum up sadness for Good Friday – I mean, we know the ending: Jesus comes back to life on Sunday. But it’s worth lingering on the Good Friday bit before racing on to the happy ending, for it was not obvious at the time how it would all end.
There’s an important life principle involved that we all need to remember. Death is part of life. We can’t always win, losing and failure are inevitable. The lament needs to be in our repertoire along with the victory march.
One lady who went through a period of great illness, said she found no help in church when it was too happy. She needed realism and an acknowledgement of pain before she was ready to move on to hope and new possibilities. Without Good Friday, Easter Sunday seems frothy and fairy-tale-ish.
So-called Good Friday was the dashing of a lot of people’s hopes and dreams. People genuinely believed that Jesus was a good thing and they’d bet their shirts on him. They left homes, jobs and families and followed this peripatetic Galilean preacher. To see him arrested, mock-tried, condemned, brutalised and killed sent them into their fox-holes where they dug out their bank statements and address books to see what they could recover of their tattered lives.
And who of us has not known this experience in some degree? Dreams that have come to nought; self-opinion proved to be greatly exaggerated; daring and courage shattered. Once hope has been so brutally assaulted, one scarcely dares to let out in the sunlight on its own again. Cynicism seems a safer bet.
It pays to reflect on Jesus’ pain and humiliation, on what it means to be true to one’s convictions and pay the price of obeying God. This cures the light-hearted of too much bobbance and bounce. It injects realism into the Sesame Street view of life that pretends we can be or do anything if we hold onto our dreams.
In the hemisphere of its origin, Easter coincides with the onset of Spring and many of the rituals and connotations connect with the rebirth of nature, new life, eggs, etc. What about here where it is the onset of Autumn, the looming of Winter, summer is past, harvest is over, growth and production are declining?
I think Good Friday has a lot to say about the colder seasons. As we bury the seeds in their long funeral mounds, and see the deciduous trees become gaunt and leafless, we face the reality of sadness and closure, loss and coldness. That’s life! Brick walls across our dream roads, forced landings for our winged hopes.
But God gives new life. It is the story of Easter. Not to be confused with the story of motivational speakers who tell us to turn our tombstones into stepping stones and our scars into stars. This is not about human effort, or the rewards of persistence.
It is the story that God vindicated Jesus by resurrection, and will vindicate those who say, I am finished, I am lost, please help me. Born out of death, resurrected from burial like seeds of wheat, new life comes. It is a way to life that few choose, preferring to trust in their own strength than to surrender into the hands of another, to hold on rather than let go. To truly live, we must be prepared to die.
To enter Easter and the qualities of light, I need reminders that Jesus was not "cured of death," as theologian James Alison puts it. That's what happened to Lazarus. Instead, Jesus kept fidelity with life. – Rose Marie Berger

by Rev. Geoff Leslie, Baptist Church