Bill Stroop Sermon, "God in the Silence" Good Friday, Year A, 21 March 2008

When we read the headlines filled with stories of war, famine, unrest, global warming, and economic recession looming on the horizon, we might ask ourselves what God thinks of all this. No matter who we are or what station we occupy in society, when we think about the status of the world informs our beliefs about God. We might, for example, consciously or unconsciously ask ourselves how God could allow the death of over 400,000 people in Darfur, the death of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust of World War II, or the deaths of innocent young people at Universities in Illinois and Virginia. Or on a more personal level, we wonder why people we love contract diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer that rob them of their personalities and strength. Where is God in all of that? And when it seems as if our prayers for God’s intervention in world affairs, or for personal spiritual strength for ourselves and our ailing friends and relatives go unanswered, we find ourselves wondering “Where is God? Has God abandoned us?” Or, “Is there a God at all?”

When we Christians commemorate Good Friday, and relive the horror of a man being nailed to a cross and slowly suffocating to death, I think we are tempted to look ahead to Easter morning when we will hear the church bells ring out triumphantly, and see the church festooned in Easter lilies, and sing songs like “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.” We don’t really want to dwell in the ugliness of Jesus last day any more than we want to read headlines about murder and mayhem or people dying of starvation and malaria.

But Good Friday and Holy Saturday remind us that there are times in life when tragedy, fear, depression, and grief just overwhelm us. Imagine what is must have been like for the women who stood at the foot of the cross and watched Jesus die that horrible day? These are the people who had followed Jesus, who had heard him teach and preach of a Kingdom of equality, fairness, and above all love and grace. They had seen in what he did and said something so powerfully different than the world they loved in. In what he said and did they saw and felt the presence of God. And yet, on the day Jesus died, they watched him and everything he spoke of slip away. They watched this man, who spoke so much of God’s love for God’s people cry out to that very same God the words of the twenty second psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And, like Jesus, they heard nothing in response. All they heard was him gasping. And when he breathed his last breath, the man they loved, and the vision he had were both gone.

It was finished. Those women and the disciples and everyone else who had so many expectations of Jesus could not imagine anything further than removing his bloodied body from the cross and burying him.

God did not answer Jesus’ prayer. God did not answer their prayers. God did not say “yes” or “no” or “not yet.”[1] God remained silent. Jesus begged, and the women prayed, but God said nothing.

When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needed [God], so happy that you are tempted to feel [God’s] claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to [God] with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to [God] when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? … Why is God so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent in our time of trouble?[2]

This then is the essence of Good Friday and Holy Saturday experience: There are times when God is silent, seemingly totally absent.

No one talks about this much, but the fact is, Good Friday and Holy Saturday are where most of us live our lives. We live in the no-man’s land between questions and answers, prayers and miracles. Even the saints among us live in this time. O, we may think they have some sort of hot line to God, and that God whispers to them all the time. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Because of her perpetual good cheer, Mother Theresa felt others believed “[her] faith, [her] hope and [her] love were overflowing and that [her] intimacy with God and [her] union with his will filled [her] heart.” But, it was not so. She once wrote, “The damned of hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. “In my soul, I can’t tell you how dark it is, how painful, how terrible – I feel like refusing God.” “I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist.” “Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. “Love,” she wrote, “means nothing.”

I imagine that the people who knew Jesus, who had heard him teach and preach, who were healed by him – all those who had such great expectations of what he would accomplish stood there that awful afternoon and watch him die felt something similar: It was finished.

But that was not the end of the story. And while God was indeed silent, God did not remain silent forever. In three days, God did something: God ended the silence by doing something total unexpected.

Although human beings killed Jesus of Nazareth for expedient political and religious reasons, God did not seek revenge and smite the people. Instead, God showed us the depth and breath of God’s love. That love transformed those grieving people – people who had every reason to despair and turn away from the Kingdom of God and move back into the more familiar status quo of the Kingdom of Man. The amazing power of the transforming love of God is where we find our hope.

God loves us unconditionally. Even when we are at our worst, God is with us. Even when we are in the deepest despair, God is with us. Even when we feel totally isolated and alone and even estranged from God, God is there. And the message of Good Friday is simply to believe that that is so, and to be patient for God to speak or to act. The whole of the Bible tells us that God does speak, but it does not say that God speaks incessantly. God may speak rarely, and may speak to those we don’t expect God to speak to. God is the master of doing the unexpected. But in the end, God’s love will be revealed to us, and it will surround us and it will transform us.

And the second message of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, is to continue to work in godly ways, doing all that we can for our fellow human beings while we wait. The women and men at the cross that day could have certainly just walked home and left Jesus’ body to hang until it went the way of all flesh letting nature take its course. After all, it was finished. But they did not do that. And neither did Joseph of Arimethea. At great personal risk he asked for the body and made his own tomb available for him. And neither did Nicodemus, who was a Pharisee, and who likely stood by while Jesus was sentenced and killed. He brought myrrh and aloes to treat the body. We do not know why Joseph and Nicodemus did these things. All we know is that they did – and at risk to themselves. They were already acting out the Kingdom life – giving of themselves. And so did Mother Theresa. Despite feeling totally alone, she continued to help the children of Calcutta, preferring to live a godly life.

That is what we are called to do too. Live the life, for through it all, and at its end, God will be there. God may be silent but God is there.

See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up,and shall be very high. Just as there were many who were astonished at him --so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals-- so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 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. Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the LORD shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.

5 To you they cried, and were saved;
in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.

6 But I am a worm, and not human;
scorned by others, and despised by the people.

8 “Commit your cause to the LORD; let him deliver --
let him rescue the one in whom he delights!”

9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.

10 On you I was cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

14 I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;

15 my mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.

21 Save me from the mouth of the lion!
From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.

22 I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:

23 You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!

24 For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him.

25 From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him.

26 The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LORD.
May your hearts live forever!

27 All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him.

29 To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for him.

31 and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that he has done it.

“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds,” he also adds, “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.” Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin. Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

After Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to a place where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered. Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples. So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons. Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” They answered, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus replied, “I am he.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, “I am he,” they stepped back and fell to the ground. Again he asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.” This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken, “I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me.” Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. Jesus said to Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” So the soldiers, their officer, and the Jewish police arrested Jesus and bound him. First they took him to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year. Caiaphas was the one who had advised the Jews that it was better to have one person die for the people. Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest, but Peter was standing outside at the gate. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the woman who guarded the gate, and brought Peter in. The woman said to Peter, “You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” Now the slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and warming himself. Then the high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and about his teaching. Jesus answered, “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret. Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard what I said to them; they know what I said.” When he had said this, one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, saying, “Is that how you answer the high priest?” Jesus answered, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest. Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They asked him, “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed. Then they took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover. So Pilate went out to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” They answered, “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him according to your law.” The Jews replied, “We are not permitted to put anyone to death.” (This was to fulfill what Jesus had said when he indicated the kind of death he was to die.) Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him. But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover. Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” They shouted in reply, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a bandit. Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. They kept coming up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and striking him on the face. Pilate went out again and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him.” So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!” When the chief priests and the police saw him, they shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him.” The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God.” Now when Pilate heard this, he was more afraid than ever. He entered his headquarters again and asked Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” From then on Pilate tried to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor.” When Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus outside and sat on the judge’s bench at a place called The Stone Pavement, or in Hebrew Gabbatha. Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, “Here is your King!” They cried out, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!” Pilate asked them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but the emperor.” Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus; and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them. Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’“ Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.” When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top. So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see who will get it.” This was to fulfill what the scripture says, “They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.” And that is what the soldiers did. Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Since it was the day of Preparation, the Jews did not want the bodies left on the cross during the sabbath, especially because that sabbath was a day of great solemnity. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed. Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.) These things occurred so that the scripture might be fulfilled, “None of his bones shall be broken.” And again another passage of scripture says, “They will look on the one whom they have pierced.” After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body. Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

[1] This sermon was inspired by Pete Greig. Exploring the Silence” in God on Mute. Ventura, CA: Regal Books/Gospel Light. 2007.
[2] Quoted in Pete Greig, op. cit. p. 195-196.

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