Good Friday: Dark

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Good Friday

3-30-18

Good Friday: Dark

I’ve only been buried alive once.  Now, the guide called it spelunking, but I know better.  The first thing you notice down there is the darkness. I had never before, and have never since, experienced that kind of darkness.  It was so thick I could feel the weight of it on my skin.  I felt like the air down there must be turning my lungs black.  It was as if the outside world no longer existed, like before God spoke “Let there be light.”  Under the earth, in that abyss, there was a complete absence of light.  It was so dark you almost forget what light is.

Something else that I remember from the caves was the moment it occurred to me that this was all very real.  It was not an amusement park.  There were no neatly marked paths or guiding lights, no exit doors for the faint of heart.  It was just me and my head lamp in a vast unmarked, unmapped subterranean maze.  Getting lost or injured or falling off a cliff were real possibilities.  It was the untamed underground.  And for the life of me, I could not remember why I had agreed to this.

And that was before the most terrifying moment of all.  Nothing sticks in my memory quite like the moment I almost got stuck.  I remember what must be the world’s smallest tunnel squeezing more claustrophobia out of my body than I knew possible.  It started out as your standard small tunnel, nothing too alarming.  But as we proceeded further and farther in, the opening became smaller and smaller.  I felt like Alice eating cake in Wonderland – as if my body was growing to fill the space.  Part of me wanted to exit the entrance but the space was far too tight for me to turn around.  There was only one way through – at least I hoped there was a way through.  The opening became so tight that, and I remember this moment vividly, I had to lay on my belly, find a way to maneuver my arms from their more natural position at my sides to stretched out in front of me because my shoulders were too wide to fit through the hole.  I was like a Superman who could not fly, a snake slithering on my belly.  And then I had to use only my toes to propel my body and my fingers to scrape and claw me forward – inch by excruciating inch through the gap – all the while quietly panicking over the possibility that I might never make it out of there.

Today we’re going down.  Good Friday plunges us into the darkness like no other day.  No exit doors for the faint of heart.  Just the Cross of Christ and the blood on our hands.  No matter how bright the sun shines outside today, it is dark in here.  The darkness of this day is so thick it sticks in your throat.  You can feel your soul start to buckle under the weight.  It is so dark you almost forget what light is.

Good Friday is as dark as the inside of the tomb before the stone was rolled away.  It is the Cross and Mary’s desperate tears and the disciples losing hope and the frenzied mob and the death of God and grave that cradles the body of Christ: all of the world’s pain and sorrow captured in that moment Jesus breathes his last.

And I wonder: how does anything ever happen after the Cross?  It is almost impossible to imagine the sun still rising on Holy Saturday.  The day and its events seem impossibly cosmic – as if every corner of the universe must have felt the impact.  And still it feels shockingly intimate, as if we’ve always known it.

Good Friday happened but also it is still happening.  It was not an isolated event.  We see Good Friday in every act of violence, in every tear that falls from a grieving parent’s eye, every time someone rages against goodness, every time someone takes advantage of love.  We live in a world that spins under the shadow of the cross.

And we know that.  That is why we lend our voices to the crowd, join their calls of “Crucify him!”: the same human impulse to kill God, to destroy something beautiful lurks in the darkest corners of our hearts.  And once a year, on this day, we just have to let it out, have to expel the poison.  Good Friday forces us to be honest about that, about our broken stuff inside.

But it’s not just that.  We know Good Friday not only from the perspective of the crowd.  We also know Good Friday because we are the Body of Christ; we are baptized into those wounds.  We know this day because life in this world means that we are forced to bear impossible pain and death.  You will be betrayed in this life.  You will be abandoned.  You will be misunderstood.  Your goodness will be trampled and your love mocked.  You will see things you can never un-see and feel things that won’t go away.  You will open your arms and your heart and be left entirely exposed.  You will be wounded and you will show scars.

Today is dark.  But it will not be the last dark day of your life.  Today we grieve.  But you will grieve again.  Today you will be shocked by the immense violence that can live in the human heart.  But this will not be the last time you are shocked by violence.  Jesus is unique.  But I am sorry to say that what happened to him on Good Friday is not.

Today we journey into the darkness.  We face the darkness in our hearts and the darkness in the world.  And for today we will live with that darkness.  It is consuming; it is oppressive; and it is real.  But it is not our destiny.  Just because the cave is dark does not mean there is no light, only that sometimes the light cannot be seen. 

After a few hours in the cave, exploring the deep darkness, I found a way out.  The sun was still out and now seemed impossibly bright.  This is our Christian hope: just beyond the darkness of Good Friday – of every Good Friday – the sun is still shining – and it is even brighter than we remember.  We don’t get stuck down there; God does not leave us in the darkness.  Even when we cannot see the light, God is preparing the sun rise.