Friday, April 3 - Good Friday: The Rev. Jim Friedrich

Psalm 22:1. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This cry from the cross is the most terrible verse in the Bible. God’s own Beloved, whose intimacy with God was so foundational to his existence that he could say “I and the Father are one,” here
expresses the inexplicable loss of the Presence in which he has lived and moved and had his being. And God’s reply to Jesus is even more chilling: SILENCE.

Uncomfortable with this image of a Christ seemingly abandoned to the void of a godless universe, some have said that Jesus is merely quoting the first verse of Psalm 22, as though his piety outweighs his pain even on the cross. But Jesus was not just quoting Psalm 22; he had become Psalm 22. The Christ who was truly human had to taste even the most painful extremities of the human condition in order to redeem us fully. The one revealed to be God-with-us had to become, in that most bitter hour, us-without-God.

Have we not been there ourselves? Whether in a personal hour of trial when our own cries go unanswered, or in modernity’s cultural house of mirrors where the interventions of a loving God seems not only unnecessary but unthinkable, there are times when the Presence feels beyond our reach.

But as Paul says, Jesus became sin itself in order to save us from it (II Cor. 5:21). Sin is wherever God is shut out and we are walled in. And in making even the hellish absence of God as integral a part of his own experience as the intimacy of divine communion, Jesus performed the ultimate paradox: even when God seems most absent, God is yet present.

Good Friday means that whatever happens to us happens to God. From now on there is no place where God is not, for God has taken into Godself even the experience of separation and forsakenness. The Presence now includes the absence.

And we who have turned from God, or lost God, we who have cried out into the SILENCE, can yet live in hope. The One who died abandoned and bereft now keeps us company on our own crosses. As the Psalmist affirms with his possessive pronoun (“My God, my God!”), the relationship remains firm and unbroken even when God seems most mute and distant. We are not alone.

—The Rev. Jim Friedrich

The Great Three Days

What makes the next three days of Holy Week so important to us? The Rev. Jim Friedrich writes:

"For those who undertake this marathon ritual experience, it is the molten core of our worship life, a sacramental immersion into the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising with Christ. It is where we do our best theology and our most heartfelt common prayer. Richly layered, multi-sensory, dramatic and moving, the Triduum is a liturgy like no other." Read more...

Thursday, April 22 - Maundy Thursday: The Rev. Karen Haig

John 13:33. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

Jesus speaks these tender words in that upstairs room where the disciples have gathered together for the last time. Jesus knows he will be leaving soon, and in the intimacy of that last meal they all share, Jesus is doing his best to prepare the disciples for his imminent departure.

The way he chooses to do that is surprising. Removing his outer robe and wrapping a towel around himself, the Lord and Teacher stoops before his disciples and washes their feet. The tenderness, the familiarity, the intimacy of this act is beyond surprising, it is shocking. It is enough that the Son of God turns servant to his friends… but to hold their dirty feet in his hands, bathing them with cool water, tenderly drying and slipping them back into their sandals… this is an act of intimacy so profound, I can hardly take it in.

There is something terribly intimate about foot washing. There is a humility in it that is different from anything I have ever experienced. Jesus was teaching his disciples that servants and masters and martyrs and queens are all beloved of God, that the first shall be last, that the divine lives in each one of us and that we are to live together a way that makes those things true.

Jesus didn’t gather the disciples in a circle on the floor and teach with his strong and tender words. He stripped down and stooped down and got very intimate. And while I know he was teaching about a kingdom where all are precious and necessary parts of the Body of Christ, what touches me more deeply is that the disciples would let him bathe their filthy, calloused, ugly feet. Jesus didn’t choose to anoint their foreheads, he choose the profoundly intimate act of foot washing. In doing that, I think he was teaching us that there’s more to loving one another than a willingness to become servants. I think he was teaching us that love means be willing to be naked and vulnerable and intimate. That is the kind of love that will change us. And the love that will change the world. 

—The Rev. Karen Haig

Wednesday, April 1: Greg Murray

Isaiah 50:4. The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.

How often in our work-a-day world have you felt anxious, fearful, overburdened and tired to the bone, and then you hear gentle words washing over you like a cooling breeze. Your burden eases and you feel peace. There is hope! There is grace! What wonderful power words can have!!

Jesus calls to us, “Come to me when are you tired and burdened, and I will give you rest.” What comfort and peace those sweet words bring!

He tells the winds of trouble, “Quiet! Be still!” What comfort and peace those sweet words bring!

In the midst of our fear, Jesus calls our name and says, “I am with you!” What comfort and peace those sweet words bring!

In this Lenten season, I pray that God will give us all the loving voice of a teacher, and teach us to share grace-filled words with our weary sisters and brothers. 

—Greg Murray