Good Friday Meditations Scott Hoezee

"Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." We think this sentence is about those soldiers scurrying at Jesus' feet. We think that the meaning is that, of course, those Roman thugs really were ignorant--how could they know they were putting the Son of God to death? No, they didn't know, and so Jesus asks God to forgive their ignorance. What we perhaps don't realize is that these words are actually about all of us. None of us knows what we're doing with the life God has given us. Ever since Adam and Eve smiled as they bit into the fruit, the rest of us have gleefully and ignorantly followed suit. We've all had the experience, haven't we? We are midway through some devious deed when suddenly we come to ourselves and so ask, "What am I doing?"

What indeed? Half the time we don't even know. But that's why Jesus came and that's why forgiveness was, is, and always will be the main event. Blessedly, Jesus always knew exactly what he was doing. Somehow the purposeful knowledge that marked Jesus' life reverses the ignorant meanderings of the rest of us. Perhaps that's why, just a little later in Luke, one of those soldiers who didn't know what he was doing, looked on the limp corpse of Jesus and declared, "Surely this was a righteous person!" So he was. And through his forgiveness, thank God Almighty, so are we all: righteous once again.

"Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom." "Today you will be with me in paradise." Considering the shape Jesus was in when the thief made his request, you could legitimately wonder if the agony of crucifixion hadn't pushed this man to insanity. Cross-eyed in pain and looking more like a street accident than a Savior, Jesus didn't look like he was going anywhere worth following. Certainly the disciples had concluded this and so had, to a man, fled.

But this thief saw something even still. "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." What kingdom? You expect Jesus to say, "Forget it, buddy! Can't you see that I'm finished, washed up, through?" But, of course, he says nothing of the kind. Instead he makes a promise: "Today you will be with me in paradise." Even on his best days Jesus did not talk much about paradise--in fact, this is the only place in the entire Bible where the word "paradise" passes Jesus' lips. Mighty strange moment to mention it for the first time!

The only time Jesus promised paradise to anybody and he's almost dead. Maybe that's because then Jesus was just then closer to securing paradise for the whole lot of us than ever before. All along he'd tried to make clear that the kingdom is not what you expect: it's a mustard seed, a treasure hidden, yeast that disappears in the dough.

Above all, Jesus made clear that the kingdom of God is most concerned with the dispossessed, the lost, the last, the least, the downtrodden. So what a perfect moment to make clear one last time that the paradise of God's kingdom is for those who know they're dead without it. "Remember me," the thief rasped out. The truth is that Jesus could never forget one such as this.

"Son, your mother. Mother, your son." Jesus was just an infant when the old man in the Temple told Mary that a sword would pierce her heart. Here and there in the years since Mary remembered those words. One day Jesus got lost in Jerusalem. But when Mary and Joseph finally tracked him down in the Temple, Jesus had the audacity to rebuke her! "Come on, mother! Don't you know that I must be about my Father's business." Mary thought that "his father's business" was carpentry and wasn't sure what that had to do with anything. But she packed him off for Nazareth and didn't mention the incident again.

Things went along well for some years until one day Jesus got a distant look in his eyes, put down his wood shaver, took off his carpenter's apron, and disappeared into the wilderness. The next they heard of Jesus he had become an itinerant preacher who was attracting quite a following. One day Mary and a couple of her children caught up with Jesus. They sent a message that his mother and siblings had arrived, only to have Jesus respond, "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Only those who do the will of my Father are my real family."

All along Mary had thought that these slights were what that old man had meant when he talked about a sword piercing her. Until this day, anyway. Now at Golgotha she knew the real pain of what it meant to be the mother of God. Long about the time it was more than she could bear, her son spoke words of unalloyed affection, asking a dear friend to take Mary as his own mother.

Through the agony, Jesus still managed to have the same good eyesight he'd had all along. Even in death the eyes that had made him the incarnation of compassion were noticing all kinds of people. Good thing, for those eyes are our very hope--we, too, need the divine gaze to fix upon us. And by grace it has. By the time you get to the Book of Revelation John tells us several times that the eyes of Jesus are a blazing fire--they pierce the darkness of our sin, pick out our faces even in this gloomy world, and, as with Mary at the cross, so with us: the eyes of Jesus not only see us, they provide us with a home at last.

"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!?" Greek theologians call it "perichoresis." It refers to the divine choreography by which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have from all eternity engaged in a verdant dance of life. Actually, perichoresis is more radical than even that: it is deeply intimate, highly personal interpenetrating of the three divine persons in God. Forever and ever, before there was time, before there was a world to save, these three persons loved one another in a sublime community of zest and of vigor and of life so overflowingly abundant it was inevitable that these three persons would end up sharing that life with a whole universe of creatures.

But then things went terribly wrong in the world God made. So a massive salvage operation was launched. The Son volunteered to be the one who would become human and who would die to save us from the worst part of our fallen selves. And although the three persons in God knew what that would mean, none of them spoke of it. They knew that a great and terrible moment would come--a disaster that would shatter their fellowship.

Now that moment had come--the moment when the Father must hide his face from the Son toward whom his face had been turned for all eternity. Now the Spirit must leave the soul of Jesus, winging himself off into some corner of the cosmos to which, for now anyway, the Son had no access. And though the Son had known for ever-so-long now that this moment must come, when it does, he cannot believe the desolation of it.

So often our Good Friday reflections focus on the blood and the gore. But in all that we may miss the real agony. Really to understand the cost of sin, you need to look not at pierced hands but at the shattered soul of the Trinity. The three persons in God bear the wounds of that brief but hellish separation from one another. We've wounded God himself forever, and still he loves us enough to want us in his kingdom. My God, my God, why have you not forsaken us? Yet He hasn't. Therein lies a mystery the full depths of which we'll never fathom.

"I thirst." "It is finished!" In some ways the words about thirst are the oddest. On the one hand it is understandable that Jesus would get thirsty in the midst of such agony. And if John told us simply that Jesus had asked for something to wet his lips, then there might not be much to this. But as a matter of fact John tells us that Jesus asked this so that he could "fulfill the Scriptures." But how does asking for a drink fulfill anything?

As a matter of fact, when John tells us that Jesus was fulfilling the Scriptures, he didn't mean a verse here or there, he meant the entire Bible, the whole truth of everything God had been up to since the creation itself. You see, the reason Jesus asked for a drink at this point was so that he could moisten up his voice enough so that all could hear the next and last thing he had to say.

In the original Greek the word "fulfilled" and the word "finished" are the exact same Greek word. Jesus was about to cap off everything the Bible had been about all along and he needed as strong a voice as he could muster to declare this news. So he asks for a drink, swallows it, and then cries out the words, "It is finished!" But what he really means is "Everything is fulfilled"--everything God ever wanted, intended, or dreamed of is now fulfilled through the sacrifice of the Lamb.

When Jesus asks for a drink, it was not to ease his pain but ours. He prepared his larynx to declare the words he had been born to speak: Creation is complete, all has been fulfilled, the cosmos has a future once again. Thanks be to God. Amen.