Good Friday Year C April 6, 2007

Meditation 1 (Isaiah 52:13-53:12, John 18:1-27)

The Rev. Kristen Dobyns

The end is near. Jesus knows it. He has already sent Judas out to collect those who will arrest him: soldiers and police from the chief priests and the Pharisees with lanterns and torches and weapons.

Two images play against each other. First, Jesus offering himself freely without defense to the corrupt powers who conspire to kill him. Second Peter, first willing to fight and save Jesus and then Peter, frightened for his own safety, staying close enough to perhaps see what will happen to his leader, yet also willing to deny his relationship to Christ three times.

Jesus is taken to Annas, the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest who has already implied that it is better that one innocent person to die for the people than for more people to suffer from the Roman oppressors. Jesus is questioned about his disciples and about his teaching. He is struck on the face for impudence although his answer is respectful. He is bound and sent to Caiaphas the high priest.

Peter hears the cock crow just after he denies Christ for the third time.

In our passage from Isaiah we heard the text about the suffering servant. Jesus who was steeped in Hebrew scripture must have known this passage well. Listen to the words;

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,

yet he did not open his mouth;

like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,

and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,

so he did not open his mouth.

By a perversion of justice he was taken away.

Who could have imagined his future?

For he was cut off from the land of the living,

stricken for the transgression of my people.

They made his grave with the wicked

and his tomb with the rich,

although he had done no violence,

and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Today, we remember our Lord Jesus as he took upon him all the injustice, the suffering, and the sorrow that we as human beings have ever suffered, do suffer, and will suffer in the future.

All of us suffer pain, loss, and disappointment at some times during our lives. Some of us suffer unjustly as did Jesus. Some are brutally murdered or beaten. Others suffer the pain of terrible diseases. Others die or lose loved ones in natural disasters, accidents, or wars.

We all have particular concerns on our hearts today. Some of us cry out for US Soldiers and their families as they fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also cry out for the victims of war. Some of us cry out for members of our own families, or even for ourselves.

I cry out this week for a young man, age 24. Joe, an Earlham college student who lives in the Peace House on campus and is known as a friend to all, and enemy to none was brutally beaten on his way back to campus Monday night. He was accosted on a well-lit bridge after 11pm, by two men, who attacked him and beat him on the head with a rock. He was walking home from a Civic Theatre play practice of the Laramie project is about the brutal murder of Matthew Shephard in Wyoming. Ironically, when he stumbled into a nearby video store after the attack, his friends who worked there first thought he was covered in fake blood from the show. It was only when he began his stammering speech that they realized he was actually covered in his own blood. Joe is currently at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, purportedly in the Neurology unit. Joe was in the Richmond Young Friends, a Quaker youth group, during his high school years along with my daughter Jessica. I have been particularly shaken because this feels so close to home. We don’t always expect brutality toward those we know even though we know intellectually that none of us are immune to violence.

Yet, we all have within us the possibility of doing good or evil to others. We all have the choice of denying whom we know to save ourselves or of experiences what may be terrible consequences when violence is turned upon us.

Peter chose denial to save himself. What could Peter have known yet about the grace, forgiveness, and acceptance he would soon receive from the risen Lord? Today, he could only live with his fears, his loss of hope in a Messiah, the crumbling of all his dreams.

What could the soldiers and the police have known about the man they arrested, the man they felt free to strike in the face? Did they know he would die for them too? After the resurrection, would some of them recognize their sin, repent, and receive forgiveness?

Today we are offered grace, unexpected grace, unearned grace.

We have a God who chose to live as one of us. Today we remember our God who chose to die as one of the least of us, a God, who chose to live and die, as a ‘suffering servant’ to us all.

May God open our hearts to the solidarity that his death and suffering as one of us shows us about God’s love. May God prepare us through this day until Easter for the story of resurrection for new hope, new life, and a new understanding of God’s immense and amazing love for all of us shown through his son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen