Sunday: Good Friday B
Reading: John 18:1-19;42
Preacher: Anne Benvenuti

We arrive today to face the great silence that was foreshadowed six weeks ago, as we began this Lenten season with ashes set on our foreheads to the words, "remember, you are dust and to dust you will return." In the words of an Anglican poet, Adelaide Crapsey, who herself died at age 35, "These be three silent things: the falling snow, the hour before the dawn, the mouth of one just dead." Of all the liturgical year; this is the time of deepest silence, when the suffering has reached its overwhelming climax and the joy has not yet come; it is the moment of greatest depth, between what was and what will yet be.

It is like the hour before dawn, when you wake alone and the world is quiet and you wonder about your life. It is like the depths of winter, when the snow falls thick and the quiet is relentlessly cold. This time is like the hours and days after the burial of a beloved, so stark and empty, when you turn to ask the one who is not there if he'd like his cup of tea and his chair is that much emptier, and grief wells up inside of you. Or when you call your dog's name and realize that she will never again run to the sound of your voice. In that quiet hour before the dawn, these are the things we might think about: where is my beloved? Does he wait for me somewhere? Has he become something else? ... Will I know her if I meet her again, in this life, or somewhere else, on the other side of my own death?

Our silence today is the silent mouth of one just dead. His death was like his life, full of integrity. Last Sunday Jim described Jesus as a man of fierce conversation, someone who engaged his real self fully in conversation after conversation, never hiding behind an image of himself, and never abandoning himself to be what someone else wanted him to be. I think that his death was his final fierce conversation with life itself.
In our Great Litany, we pray to be delivered from dying suddenly and unprepared. If we let ourselves think about death at all, we want a good death, lying in bed with our dear ones around us, all conflicts resolved, all attachments nicely loosened so that we might fly and not to cling too hard to this life that must end. We hope not to die as Jesus did, abandoned, ashamed, in pain and at the door of a final despair, beyond the reach of any hope.

Yes, Jesus died a horrible death. Unfortunately, it was not so extraordinary in terms of the suffering he endured. Untold numbers have died in agony, alone or betrayed or even killed by their loved ones. So many women every year die at the very hands of their own husbands and fathers. So many men die in wars far from home. Like so many before him and since, Jesus died in shame and agony, God and man, reduced to petty political inconvenience, easily dispensed with, one of millions of scapegoats. He died betrayed by his friends, and far, far worse, by the God for whom he had lived. In the hour of his greatest need, his long time companion denied knowing him. And Jesus, even on the cross, could forgive it, though Peter did not easily forgive himself. But the betrayal of Jesus by his God, his father, is unthinkable, impossible. In Matthew's Passion we hear in Jesus' final moments, his shameless cry to heaven, "My God, My God, Why have you abandoned me?" ...And this is the moment when I am moved to follow Jesus, not so extraordinary in his suffering, but so very rare in his response to it.

Jesus, had lived his life as a perfect conversation with his Father, true to himself at every moment, Jesus listened deeply, acted bravely. And Jesus had the courage to expect that God would meet him, be true to him, that God would justify his way of living and his very life. But God did not do that; God let him die, and die horribly, no pillows fluffed about him. I think it was the lifelong habit of perfect integrity with which Jesus had lived that would not let him whitewash this moment, that lead him to cry out-he was not going to pretend it was okay, all a part of the plan and he just needed to hang in there till Easter. He did not wink at God knowingly, as they together completed the magic trick of the millennia.
No. He was dying now and he knew it. In utter dismay he cried, "why have you abandoned me?" But he was out of time; he could not wait for God's reply. He had to make his final disposition without waiting to see what was over the next rise, around the next curve; for there would be no next rise, no curve in the road. This was the end of the road, there would be silence, and it was rushing towards him. His final disposition was quickly and certainly found, not in bed surrounded by family and friends, not as the final act of a long and accomplished life, but right in the middle of horrendous violence and betrayal, and in the middle of a life half lived. Luke's gospel tells us that Jesus expressed, in his very last words, once again and finally, the depths of who he is, "Into your hands I commend my spirit." ....

God, I don't know what you are doing, but I know what I must do; I must trust you with my last breath, as I have trusted you with my every breath, moment by moment, from Bethlehem to Golgotha.
Jesus used his last words to express the choice he'd made over and over in his life, and now with his death, the choice to soften his heart, to stay connected. One final and decisive time, he filed the callus from off his heart before it could form there. To the rawness of his suffering, he added the rawness of his own willful trust. And then he died. His mouth, newly dead, became silent and that silence rings down the centuries to us, gathered here at St. Paul and the Redeemer to listen to it, the crushing silence of Jesus, dead.
What does Jesus say to us in this silence? .... Have you lost a loved one to death? Or lost what you worked for, right in the middle of doing it? Or have you been guilty of letting someone down, really letting her down, so that she might say you betrayed her? Have you experienced betrayal by friends or colleagues, or the miscarriage of justice? Have you perhaps had reason to think about your own death? ... Then this is your story, too. And you and I have choices to make as we breathe through these challenges of our own, the daily choices that will form our dying when it comes. Will we let bitterness leach away our God-given goodness? Will we let guilt for our wrongs grow a callus around our hearts to protect us from the pain we've caused? Or will we choose to soften ourselves into life, to forgive ourselves, to show our faces, to connect and to require that God look at us full on in the truth of our lives. Do we dare to have a fierce conversation with God, a conversation in which we do not hide behind what we think we are supposed to look like for God's sake, but in which we speak our truths?

When we identify with Jesus on the cross, we can't pretend to be better than we are; after all, it is a pretty low moment. Yet we could not possibly be better than this moment, either. Jesus died. He did not pretend to die so that he could reappear in another act, triumphant. Jesus, truly one of us, a human, died; and he died as he'd lived, faithfully and full of goodness. A long history of the iconography of suffering has suggested to us that God is all about suffering and sacrifice, making Jesus suffer and die because of our wrongs. But today, one of the many things I hear in the silence of Jesus' death is that he is one of us; Jesus, human, good and faithful and beautiful, is humanity's gift to God, a gift of love for God that could only come by way of us, our kind.

The beloved is dead. And the questions of the dark and silent hours are upon us now: Does he wait for us somewhere? Has he become something else? Will we know him if we meet him again, in this life, or somewhere on the other side of our own deaths?