Good Friday Sermon

Dying Jesus, at the end of yourself you turned, and spoke words of togetherness in the places of the torn. May we always find words to hold, especially in times when the world harms. Because sometimes words can heal. We pray this in your name. Amen.

I was like a trusting lamb led to the slaughter. I did not know it was against me that they devised schemes, saying, Let us destroy the tree with its fruit; let us cut him off from the land of the living.
That saying from our Tenebrae service has stayed with me since Wednesday.

A trusting lamb led to the slaughter (innocence)… let us destroy the tree with its fruit; let us cut him off from the land of the living (evil).

It seems that the authorities could not handle what Jesus brought to Jerusalem. They didn’t care about truth. They didn’t care about love. They held power and were not going to let Jesus take it from them.

He had to be sacrificed. Cut off. Crucified.

No matter that Jesus showed on Maundy Thursday that his life is based on service, a bowl of water and a towel – he reached for instruments of service and community rather than instruments of power.

But the authorities were too afraid to listen. At the foot of the cross, all his disciples, watched, horrified at what had taken place. Would they be next? What do they do now?

So many people have experience Good Friday either in their lives or as bystanders…

When Pauline Chen began medical school twenty years ago, she dreamed of saving lives. What she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. She chronicles her wrestling with medicine’s profound paradox in her recent book, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality.

When a patient is dying in the intensive care unit, the protocol is always the same: Doors and curtains are closed around the patient and family, monitors are turned off — and physicians make themselves scarce. But one death during her internship dramatically changed Doctor Chen’s thinking. Early one morning, a patient’s heart began to fail after his long battle with colon cancer. Doctor Chen called the family and the attending surgeon. The dying man’s wife arrived first. Doctor Chen took her to her husband’s room and quietly slipped out, as protocol dictated. But when the attending arrived, he took the woman’s hand and quietly explained what was happening. She began to sob. But then, contrary to the norm, the doctor closed the curtains around the three of them. Doctor Chen remembers:

“I peeked in. Inside, the woman was still sobbing, but she was standing with her hand in her husband’s. The surgeon stood next to her and whispered something; the woman nodded and her sobs subsided. Her shoulders relaxed and her breathing became more regular. The surgeon whispered again, pointing to the monitors and to the patient’s chest and then gently putting his hand on the patient’s arm. He was, I thought, explaining how life leaves the body — the last contractions of the heart, the irregular breaths, the final comfort of her presence . . . Thirty minutes passed before the surgeon stepped out. Soon after, the patient’s wife appeared; her husband had died. She thanked us, smiled weakly, and walked out of the ICU.”

What the attending surgeon did that morning had a profound effect on Doctor Chen. She stopped slipping away from her dying patients but stayed with them and their families, answering questions, explaining what was happening, offering comfort and consolation.

“From that moment on,” Doctor Chen writes, “I would believe that I could do something more than cure.”

At the foot of anyone’s cross, even our own, it is God who calls us to listen consciously, deliberately, wisely for his voice in the depths of our hearts, to listen for his voice in the love and joy, the pain and anguish, the cries for mercy and justice of those around us.

Even at death, it is love that is not a stranger.

Coda Toward the New New Covenant: Death Sentence
(for Father Joseph Kane)
by Mary Karr

We lean close when the dying speak
though instinct says recoil from
the decaying form, but silence
radiates off them and blooms our loud
selves out, out, out of the way, and we long
to know what from each essential
self will exhale over us, and if we every
single one of us (it would only work
if we all agreed) listened to our own
deaths growing inside us geologically
slow inching forward as the skull
will someday edge through skin, then we would
each speak only the truest lines:
I’ve always loved you.

Even at the foot of the cross, I’ve always loved you is the words Jesus give to us. Amen.