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Silence And Darkness
The last of the Tenebrae candles is extinguished, as I suffocate its fire with the snuffer. Peter has denied Jesus. The congregation sits in near-perfect darkness, observing the silence they read about in their orders of service before the light of the final candle died. I have a little assistance as I oversee the service: I have brought the reading light I bought for my Kindle and attached it to the lectern. Together, we enter the dark silence of God. Or should that be the silent darkness of God? Perhaps it is both.
I resurrect the candle flame, and we are to continue sitting in silence. However, the presence of light makes that silence more difficult. People shuffle. I become more aware of the cramp in my toes, and wish I could take my shoe off to put my foot on the cold stone floor. “Could you not wait?” said Jesus.
We leave in silence. The clearing-up is done in a quiet not usually experienced.
This morning, we gather at Holy Trinity church to begin our silent walk of witness to St Hugh’s for our united service. On a cool, bright morning we prepare to remember darkness. As we pass by the Chinese takeaway, the children of the owners are sitting in the window, munching prawn crackers and watching us with innocent puzzlement. Our cross is large, and only tall, strong men are able to carry it. We walk in silence, surely in contrast to the crowds who witnessed Jesus carrying his cross beam. It was a public holiday then, and it is today. But not for us the usual jollity. Instead, we are solemn.
The quiet, slow pace cannot continue for me, though, as I have no time to attend the united service in Knaphill. Instead, I walk home, unlock the car and drive to Addlestone for their united service. Before I engage clutch and gear lever, I check my mileage: it may be the holiest day of the year, but it is also the first day of a new tax year and I have to enter in my records how many miles I have driven in the last twelve months. Even on Good Friday, I am not in a bubble that insulates me from the usual world.
As Richard leads the service, we are invited to write on paper crosses those things we would like to bring to the foot of Christ’s Cross. While singing the Taizé chant ‘Jesus, remember me’, we do just that. I name some fears and feel some peace in placing them at the Cross.
Richard asks us to leave the service in silence. If we want to talk, we can do so over hot liquid caffeine in the vestibule. Except the silence is broken by an announcement that the teas and coffees must be brought into the worship area, because outside the staff of the Addlestone Food Bank are preparing to serve those in need. Noise and chatter, yes, and no silence – but it seems like a fitting response to the ministry of the Cross, as does my conversation with a colleague from another church about the hosting of an Alpha course.
The rushing from Knaphill to Addlestone has seemed so inappropriate for reflection. It is only now I have got back that I can home in on the value of the silence and the darkness. Today and tomorrow, as I remember Jesus lying in the tomb, I can prepare for a different kind of rushing on Sunday. In three morning services, I shall be facilitating joy. I have to link the two. Today is not merely about despair, and Easter Day is more than the happy ending. They belong together. The silence and darkness of betrayal and death, with the noise and light of an empty tomb.
Good Friday Experiences
I began Good Friday today with a united walk of witness here in Knaphill. Beginning at the Catholic church, we walked to the King’s House Coffee Shop, then to the Methodist premises, followed by the Baptist church, and finally to Holy Trinity C of E. At each stop someone read a portion of the Passion story. Different people volunteered to carry the big cross on each leg of the journey.
Most moving for me was the final leg, when a man with learning difficulties asked to carry the cross. Nothing like as physically big as his predecessors in the task, he struggled in places and had to be helped by two other men. It was a small glimpse of Jesus falling down and needing help from Simon of Cyrene.
As the one co-ordinating the walk, I found myself at each stop standing on one side of the person with the cross, while on the other side was the reader for that particular episode from the story. In a tiny way, it was like being one of the two thieves either side of Jesus.
In these two ways, I found myself entering into the Passion story in new and unexpected ways this year. The sadness was in having to leave the following united service at Holy Trinity fifteen minutes in to get to the tail end of a united service at my other church, Addlestone Methodist. I arrived at that, just as they were singing the closing hymn. Having to flit between the two communities felt like it undermined a sense of belonging. Can you belong in more than one community at once? If missional Christianity includes earthing ourselves in a particular place by incarnational ministry, does this militate against it?
I wasn’t the only minister facing this issue: the Methodist deacon left at the end of the service to go to his other church, and two of the New Frontiers church leaders came over from Chertsey, where they used to be based and still share with other Christians.
Unlike in Knaphill, there had been no united walk of witness in Addlestone. Some of the people in Addlestone said how much they missed it. A discussion on why we think the procession of witness on Good Friday is important would be interesting. As I’ve said, it hit home for me today in unexpected ways. On other occasions, I’ve watched passers-by as Christians walk behind a cross on this day of the year, and wondered whether they felt we were doing it as a reproach against them. I don’t suppose most Christians do have that attitude, but I’m curious to know how it’s perceived, if at all. A judgement? An anachronism? Other reactions?
In contrast, my wife and children didn’t come with me on any of these events or services. They needed something more child-friendly. Happily, the nearby church of Holy Trinity, West End Village had a suitable act of worship for children for Good Friday. Too often we are so caught up with the solemnity of the day that we exclude children by the tone of what we offer. Holy Trinity West End knew better. They provided a service called ‘Paradox’. It included two songs, a very short talk by the Rector, and plenty of crafts. Rebekah had her photo taken with her cross on which she had chosen to write, ‘Jesus died for me.’ If Christ died for all creation, then he died for the children – don’t we owe it to them also to find a way of including them in on this most holy of days? I’m glad Holy Trinity did.
I’ll be interested to know your thoughts on our experiences. But I’ll stop typing there and go back to finishing preparations for Easter Day.
Good Friday: Seven Last Words From The Cross
Obviously it’s too late for this year, but I thought I’d share with you a resource I used in a meditation for Good Friday this morning. For some time now I’ve received regular emails from the Audiopot website. On this site you can find radio-style broadcasts in MP3 format on Christian themes. It was set up by a long-standing evangelical missionary organisation, HCJB Global, whose activities have included radio and media for many years.
Recently, they posted on the site a series of four-minute meditations on the ‘seven last words from the Cross’. I downloaded them (you need to register free of charge on the site in order to do that or to preview them in full). There is no compulsion to pay for the downloads, but they ask if you can donate 50p per item to help towards the cost of the site. And that is almost certainly why these MP3s are not in a podcast and/or with an RSS feed.
I don’t know what the reaction of my congregation was this morning, because I had to rush off to another service, but I thought they were worthwhile. They ranged from a woman who lives on the ‘peace line’ in Belfast speaking about ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing’, to the mother of a soldier killed in friendly fire reflecting on ‘Woman, here is your son’ and an elderly dying minister talking about ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit’. Nothing trite, triumphalistic or easy.
If these interest you, then I suggest you register on the site and search for ‘Seven last words’.
Taking The Good Friday Journey
Last year, Nick Baines wrote a helpful and provocative post about embracing the desolation of Good Friday (and, indeed, Holy Saturday) without importing the triumph of Easter Day. In it, he argues that we should restrain ourselves from singing the joyful songs that come from knowing the outcome of Easter, and embrace the darkness.
I can see his point, and it has much to commend it, especially in evangelical Christian circles where we can default into triumphalism at all sorts of inappropriate times. Think of the ways in which some funerals become only a celebration of the deceased’s life, and leave little room for grief. That isn’t limited to evangelicals, or indeed Christians. It is part of a wider cultural movement that does not want to feel the sting of death.
I can see Nick’s point too, when I consider the members of churches who avoid Good Friday worship, but who will be at church early on Easter Day. We have people in our churches who can’t cope with the Cross. Not that anyone should cope with it in the sense of managing it – you could say it is meant to be unmanageable – but there are many who wish to live in denial of it, even referring to it as a tragedy or a defeat, completely failing to appreciate the magnitude of its victory.
Yet I wonder too whether this last group of people might be the very ones who especially need the linking of Good Friday and Easter Day. Not that I mean to let anyone off the hook in contemplating the sufferings of Christ, but because it is central to our faith to believe in the victory of Christ, and you can only appreciate that when you link the death and resurrection of Jesus. And given the way I have heard some church people say that Good Friday is ‘the most tragic day of the year’, I do wonder whether they believe the Gospel.
Like it or not, we cannot approach Good Friday without a measure of interpretation. It is there in the inspired writings of the Gospels, although we are perhaps so used to the text that we don’t always see it. And one thing is for sure: for the Gospel writers, the death of Jesus was not a defeat.
And also, whether we like it or not, it is (near) impossible to read the text as if we don’t know what is going to happen next. When I hear people ask me to read something ‘as if for the first time’, I know they are going to ask me something I probably can’t achieve. The trouble is, we do know the ending.
So how do you prefer to approach Good Friday? With a knowledge of the ending? Or trying to enter into the story as if you don’t know what will happen? What are the pros and cons for you?
Sabbatical Day 69, Good Friday: Jesus Is Crucified
more about “Sabbatical Day 69, Good Friday: Jesus…“, posted with vodpod
Here is the Damaris Trust video for Good Friday. Andrew White talks about the importance of Jesus’ death on the cross on our behalf. He discusses what this means for his ministry of reconciliation in Iraq.
We went into town this morning for the annual open-air united service in Chelmsford High Street. A band from the church where we are worshipping led the music, and the choir from our children’s school dazzlingly performed a selection of songs from a musical entitled Resurrection Rock.
A nun from a local community spoke. Hers was a serious address where she spoke of Bad Friday and Good Friday. Today is only Good Friday because it is about redemptive suffering. Anything else would be Bad Friday. Suffering isn’t good for its own sake. She spoke passionately as one who had spent years in the Democratic Republic of Congo, serving women and young girls who had been raped by HIV positive men, young boys who had been brutalised into becoming child soldiers and mothers who had watched children die from diseases we find easily preventable in the West.
And from that, she made a connection between Good Friday and Easter Day. For whenever we, who believe in Christ’s redemptive suffering and conquest of death, minister to those in need or work for justice, we are doing Resurrection work. In that sense, she asked, is the Resurrection happening today?
Later, Rebekah – who had understandably described that part of the service as ‘longer than church’ – posed again the question, “Why do we call it ‘Good Friday’ and not ‘Bad Friday’?” I tried to explain how God took the Bad that was done to Jesus and turned it for Good. She found that hard to grasp.
In the back of my mind I was thinking of Tim Keller‘s The Reason For God, and his chapter on the Cross. He explains how forgiveness and love inevitably involve both substitution and exchange. When we forgive someone, it always comes at a cost. If I forgive you a debt, I take on that debt. He doesn’t get into the question of Pauline language and whether to speak of penal substitution, just that forgiveness must in some sense involve the substituting of the debt, and that this consitutes and exchange. The notion of exchange, he says, is fundamental to love. If I love my children, I will exchange my freedom for their well-being. I will not only give them attention when it is convenient to me, for if I do that they will only grow up physically. Love means I will attend to them when it is inconvenient. I give up my freedom to serve them in love. This, says Keller, is like what Christ does for the world on the Cross.
I shall be interested to plug those thoughts into those from a book that is on its way from Amazon: Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision by Tom Wright. I’d like to see how this compares and contrasts with Wright’s more cosmic vision of salvation. The Reformation tradition has tended to take Luther’s question of “How can I find a gracious God?” and insert the word ‘personally’ after ‘I’. That is critical, but I know that in this book, Wright is saying that such a question makes the sun orbit around us rather than vice-versa. We’ll see …
