Meditations for Good Friday and Black Saturday
Good Friday: Matthew 27:45-50
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”… And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.
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At this point on the Cross, Jesus has now stepped into territory that we are not allowed to enter. We are like Moses, only allowed to stand outside this God-forsaken Land, watching from afar as Jesus enters in without us. Up to this point, his suffering, though great, has been relatable. His pain has been like ours in some way or another.
Until now we have been able to understand – some more than others – the pain of Jesus. We know what it is to be betrayed, to go through horrible physical pain, to be publicly humiliated, to be falsely accused. His suffering up to this point, though horrendous, has been ordinary human suffering. And as mentioned in the last chapter, this is a great comfort to us. But now, having hung on the Cross for six hours, slowly asphyxiating, slowly bleeding out, he cries aloud to the darkened sky, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
What is wrong? Has Jesus suddenly lost his faith, here at the goal line? Are we observing some latent doubt finally surface? Has he realized, as he feels his lungs begin to quit on him, that his Father is not going to show up after all?
What we are seeing is not Jesus’ disappointment or doubt, for he predicted this crucible beforehand. Neither is his forsaken cry “just an expression,” for Jesus is speaking literally. He is forsaken in his hour of need by Someone much more crucial than his disciples, denied by Someone he needs far more than Peter. A blow has fallen that is far more excruciating than the flogging, the crown, and the nails. Something Else has been taken from him, the loss of which is more devastating than all the rest combined. “Eli!” he cries, naming the One he’s lost, his God, his Father. “Eli!” he croaks, naming the One who dealt the blow. This moment is what had him sweating blood in Gethsemane. This is what choked him up at the Supper. Dreadful as it is, this is the crux of what he came to do – as the Apostle’s Creed puts it, to “descend into Hell.” That is, to be forsaken by his own Father.
But why? Why would the Son of God be forsaken, cursed, damned? Jesus does not put it in the form of a question for no reason. He wants us to attempt an answer. Why would such a thing happen to him? Or an even better question – why would his own Father do such a thing? Throughout the Bible, God’s rejection is a punishment reserved for sinners. It is always the unholy who are cast out of God’s presence. But Jesus is no sinner. And he is the Holy One of Israel. So why is he now forsaken? The answer to the question lies within us. He is forsaken for me. And he is forsaken for you, if you can believe it.
We all have some sense of our impending rejection, depending on how honest we are. Another word for that sense is “shame.” Just as our guilty conscience indicates that we have broken the law of God, our shame indicates that we are unworthy of God. Our shame knows there is a sign at the gate of Glory that says “You must be this holy to enter” and that we fall short. And though we were created in the inherent dignity of the image of God, that image has been obscured, the dignity corrupted. And the obscurity and corruption is so thorough that we who were once holy and good must be thrown out, like a decorated soldier turned traitor, like Old Yeller gone rabid. We all must be rejected, for God is holy and our holiness was lost long ago. God is light, but we fell in love with the darkness long ago.
The problem, in other words, is personal. We have not only done bad things, we are bad. We have not only broken the law, we are broken people. We are not good people who sometimes do wrong; there is something wrong with us. And so Jesus’ suffering must go further than paying the penalty for our sinful deeds. To make atonement between us and God Jesus also has to suffer the rejection we are due because of who we are. And he does so by becoming who we are. “For God made him who knew no sin to be sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God.” The opposite of his transfiguration, Jesus is here disfigured into sin itself. In his Father’s eyes he becomes a sinner. But what sins has he committed for which he is now cast out? Mine. For whose unworthiness is he forsaken? Yours.
He shares in our shame and is forsaken for it so that you and I might share in his holiness and be accepted for it, “that we might become the righteousness of God.” As the Son is forsaken in place of the world, the presence of God rips through the curtain of the Holy of Holies into his beloved, sinful world. The angels who once guarded Eden from trespassers turn and throw the gates open wide. And the Father who has waited for his prodigal children for so long is able to walk with them once again in the cool of the day. With this final deathbed act, having placed our hand into his Father’s, the work Jesus came to do is finished.
Black Saturday: Matthew 27:57-61
When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who also was a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.
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We must never forget that before the resurrection occurred, the cross is everything but victorious. On Saturday, Good Friday is the worst. Jesus’ corpse is being passed around, from the Roman guards to Joseph of Arimathea to Nicodemus to, finally, the tomb, and with each exchange of hands, reality sets in. He’s dead.
His disciples had entered into Jerusalem just five days before with their heads held high as their Master was praised with palm branches as the new King. They were happy for him, for one another, and for their people. ‘Can you believe it? We’ve made it!’ ‘About time he revealed himself!’ ‘The King, the kingdom, it’s finally here!’ They had sacrificed so much, prepared so eagerly, waited so long for that very Day.
But the Day of the Lord turns out to be a dark night of the soul for his followers. Those heads once held high now wag with shame because of their association with their humiliated Master. Those who strutted alongside the Son of David now flee and hide in the shady corners of the City of David. What the disciples thought was a dream come true is a nightmare in disguise, their Lord lying in a tomb rather than sitting on a throne.
And now, in this passage, we find “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary there, sitting opposite the tomb.” All they can do is sit and watch. Scripture does not try to explain the emotions of these women as they sit opposite the tomb, making them easy to miss. But we should not let our foreknowledge of Sunday make us forget to pause here and consider the devastation of Friday. Rather, to prepare us for Sunday, let’s take a seat next to Mary Magdalene, join her and the other Mary in their graveside vigil. We must watch with them in grief and rage on Friday evening before rejoicing on Sunday morning. We must sit with them in the shock of Friday’s failure so that we can skip and leap with them in Sunday’s surprise.
Sit with the two Marys as Joseph and Nicodemus haul in the dead body that no longer houses their Lord. Watch with them for some sign of life as they embalm the body in the fresh-hewn tomb. Sit with them as they roll the stone in front of the exit, one final giant nail in the coffin.
‘What happened?’ you would have thought. ‘Where did things go wrong? I know he was the One. But how can the One be dead? How could evil prevail? Sin win? God be defeated by the Devil? I’m missing something.’
As the stone sealed the deal, the denial would have faded into doubt. ‘Why didn’t God protect his Holy One from corruption? Unless…Jesus wasn’t the Holy One after all. Maybe he wasn’t the Son. Maybe he was just a good guy that we mistook for a King. Maybe all this religion stuff really is just a bunch of bologna after all.’
Doubts of this nature surely pass through some, if not all, of the disciples’ minds. The overwhelming mood of the disciples before the news of the resurrection is one of complete shock. They can’t remember a thing Jesus said about coming back from the dead. They are completely blindsided by the crucifixion, as if he had never said anything about it at all.
But if we are to truly understand the disciples’ loss, we need a bit more humanity in all of this. Yes, they had believed Jesus was the Messiah. Yes, they had put their hope in the kingdom he had promised. Yes, they had put their trust in him as the Son of God. And those things are certainly part of their grief and confusion. But forget about all of that for a moment. Just for a minute, don’t be so religious and theological. More than anything, these two women grieve not simply for political or religious reasons, but because the person they have come to love more than anything in all the world is gone.
The disciples love Jesus, and so this is not just a loss for Israel, but a loss of the most personal kind. They left everything and followed him not because they were especially spiritual, but because they loved him. And now they grieve all the harder because of their love. Sure, the disciples’ aspirations for power and visions of grandeur are now crashing down among them. But the disciples do not weep for those, but for him. Mother Mary for her firstborn child, Mary Magdalene for the kindest man she’s ever known, Peter, James and John for their best friend. Just as the bystanders said about Jesus’ tears at Lazarus tomb, it is now our turn to point to the tears of his disciples and say, “See how they loved him!”
We have all felt it in some measure, that void that is left when a loved one dies. The thought, “But you were just here.” The sight or touch of the body that silently cries out, “Gone, gone, gone!” The regrets of all the unasked questions, unsaid thanks, and unshared hearts. Gone.
But there is often that disbelief, that strange, forgetful hope when we lose a loved one, that we will find them still sitting in their favorite recliner when we return home. We find ourselves looking out the window, expecting them to pull up in the driveway for a visit. We check the price on a shirt at the store we think will fit them just right. But then, of course, we realize such hope is in vain – we’ve forgotten that our beloved is no longer there. The recliner is empty, the driveway silent, and we are left holding a shirt that we need to return. And when we come to our senses, we are worse off for our forgetful moment of hope, losing our beloved all over again.
I wonder if the disciples experience the same strange “foolish” hope after Jesus dies. When they hear someone arguing with a Pharisee about the Sabbath, does Peter push through the crowd to see if it’s him? Do Mary and Martha forget and set the table with an extra seat for him? Does Mother Mary see his favorite fruit on sale at the market and buy an extra bushel? And then do they, too, have that moment when they realize all over again that he is gone?
The difference, of course, is in the disciples’ case the hope wouldn’t have been so foolish nor the disbelief so strange. Because in just another couple of days their Beloved will, indeed, be just around the corner. He will actually stop by and sit down with his friends for a meal. His mother won’t have to return the fruit because her son, who is dead, will be alive and well.
