Good Friday – George Yandell
I want to talk of grief. The words grief and grieve from the Latin gravare = to burden, from gravis = heavy. As they pass through Old French, grief and grieve pick up the sense of ‘to harm’. Our word grieve means ‘to cause to be sorrowful; distress’. Grief means ‘deep mental anguish, as that arising from bereavement’.
Our understanding of grief and grieving has undergone remarkable changes in my lifetime. In the early 1970’s Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified 5 distinct stages of grief. We now have come to understand that grieving is not predictable, but is personal – everyone grieves differently. Approaching death is not a cookie-cutter experience. As we hear Jesus with his friends throughout the gospels, he frequently speaks to them of his coming death and theirs as well. These are instances of preparatory grieving – of anticipatory grief.
Listen to these moments when Jesus speaks of his impending death:
In the very center of Mark’s gospel Jesus says to his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus immediately began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after 3 days rise again.” Listen to how Peter responds – “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him,” to deny that Jesus could die that way. Peter was attempting to bargain Jesus out of his destiny.
In Luke (17:22 ff) Jesus tells it this way, “The days are coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it…For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must endure much suffering and be rejected by this generation.” (18:31 ff) “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man…will be accomplished.
For he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.” Luke concludes with this statement: “But they understood nothing about all these things- it was hidden from them.” Disbelief, denial. Their hearts couldn’t entertain that Jesus could die, even though he said clearly he would rise again.
Our experiences of death range from tragic slams of anger, to denial, to bargaining, depression, and maybe to eventual acceptance. But no one else grieves like I grieve. So it was with Jesus’ closest companions. They all responded to death in different ways.
How many times did Jesus and his friends walk out of Jerusalem to the west? How many times did they pass under the rotting corpses of fellow Jews who had been crucified by the Roman Empire? What did it do to them? Did it stiffen their resistance against the empire? Did it put the fear of the false god-emperor into them?
Some scholars have found two parallel crucifixion stories in Mark’s gospel, which holds the earliest of the crucifixion accounts. The second account reads like this: “And it was the third hour when they crucified him. And the inscription of the charge against him read, ‘The King of the Jews.’ Those who passed by reviled him. Those who were crucified with him also reviled him. And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice and breathed his last. And the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”
You can hear Mark’s account inside the passion story from John we just read. John certainly had Mark’s story in mind when he recorded his account. “This narrative interprets Jesus’ death not as that of an innocent, righteous suffering servant of God, but as an agonizing conflict between the powers of light and the powers of darkness. This is [an end-of-the-age] interpretation. When Jesus had received the sour wine and drank it, he said “It is finished.” “Jesus did not count equality with God as something to be grasped or held onto, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” “Jesus is the divine redeemer who completely emptied himself of his divine glory”. [The above two paragraphs adapted from Preaching the New Lectionary, Reginald Fuller, 1974, p. 352]
John Dominic Crossan has often said, “Jesus would be executed by the powers of the world’s dark empires in every age, including our own.” This is the nature of the conflict between the vision of God’s peace and justice Jesus lived for, and the vision of power-seeking through violence.
After his mock trial Pilate ordered Jesus be flogged or scourged. Scourging was standard pre-crucifixion procedure. It was done with a whip made of several leather straps to which sharp abrasive items like nails, glass or rocks were attached. Scourging resulted in severe lacerations of the skin and damage to the flesh beneath. [From The New Interpreters’ Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 5, 2009, pp. 135-6]
The flogging itself sometimes killed convicted men. With the strips of skin handing loose and blood pouring down, Jesus was faint with desperate pain. It was no wonder in Luke that the guards seized Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross-piece to which Jesus’ wrists would be nailed. Yet Jesus identifies with the crowd following him and Simon — through his pain he hears their grief and sorrow and tells the crowd, “Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. The days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore… They will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ His empathy for those he left behind penetrated through his suffering. “In Mark first, but echoed almost verbatim in Matthew and Luke, we learn that when Jesus was seized by the crowd of guards “all,” please note not some, but “all” of his disciples forsook him and fled. No disciple is recorded as being present at the cross in the first three gospels written, because they were not there!