Good Friday "...and he breathed forth his spirit'

Good Friday – ‘…. and he breathed forth his spirit’

Today we celebrate the crucifixion of Jesus. We are able to do this because we know he rose from the dead.

However, we need to step back a little and remember that Jesus died, really, absolutely died. He did not appear to die. He did not go into his trial, torture and execution with the thought ‘It will all be o.k. because I will rise again’.

Jesus died.

He died just as truly as every living being died and will die.

We must not forget this.

If we forget this, then his whole life and his Rising will be gutted of its power and deep meaning.

Neither must we allow our knowledge of his Rising let us stray from the fact that he did what we will all do – he died.

Think of Jesus: a man in his prime, abounding in vitality, seized by his calling, afire with God, strong in love, passionate and tender. Everything to live for. Jesus was not someone with a death wish. The gospels tell us that he would leave a place because of death threats such as happened at Nazareth when the townsfolk wanted to harm him.

Jesus would have known that powerful people wanted him silenced. His own predictions of the passion, while partly the work of the evangelists, seem to me to be grounded in Jesus own sense that this is how his life and ministry may end.

When the final betrayal came, there was something more important for Jesus than saving his own life. That was the consistency of his conduct with the truth of God that he embodied. He was faithful.

Jesus’ attitude to his death was no philosophically detached resignation. He grieved for his impending death; he grieved for those he would leave; he grieved that people did not understand. He begged God to relieve him of this…. this ending. In the end he went to betrayal, incarceration, torture and death in the darkness of faith that holds on when all outward signs have gone, when everything appears lost.

As we will all do one day he surrendered himself to the final detachment – he surrendered all who he was, all he had done, all he loved into the hands of God.

His life dimmed, went out.

Jesus died.

To the world, it was an end. To be rejoiced over or to be grieved over depending on which ‘side’ you were on.

The friends and family who had abided with him, the women who had watched with him and an emboldened secret follower did what was necessary for decent burial. Others fled in bewildered fear.

We know, and they were to know soon that something happened, something so outside their experience that we have been trying to understand it ever since. To say that Jesus rose from the dead does not in any way take away the very human and real fact that he died.

Jesus remains dead.

He lives now, not as we do, but in a completely new reality, more intimate with and in creation than the limitations of a human body could previously allow. If Jesus’ human body is not alive in this new dimension, then nothing about him is.

Theologies that imagine the Resurrection as a collective experience of the disciples or as ‘inspiration’ or in some way diminish the physical reality of Jesus Risen, to me miss the whole point. Jesus, in the passing over of his death has drawn together creation that poured forth from the heart of God at the very beginning, and carried it with him into the heart of God. There is now something new within creation. And that is Jesus, more intimate, more present, more subversive.

In the end, our words fall short of the mystery of Jesus’ death and rising. I think it is no coincidence that one of the most frequent images associated with Jesus’ life is the pietà. This image resonates with our human experience of grief and loss. We mourn, we grieve, we remember, we do all those loving human things that cherish the person who had died.

So today, with the liturgy let us gaze upon Jesus. He had to die, as we all will die. Let us not diminish the enormity of this. Yet it is precisely here, in Jesus final act of surrender, that God is most fully shown as unfailingly faithful, life giving, cherishing creation.

As Jesus' death was consistent with his living, so will our death be.

We know now that death is not the end.