What Wondrous Love

Last night we doused the candles that we had originally lit on Ash Wednesday.

We snuffed them out one by one as we re-read each of the six biblical stories from our EPIC Lent series, the Experience, Practice, and Identity Circle that shapes our sense of who God is before us and who we are before God. We doused the candles because we know that one Maundy Thursday the disciples failed. Every single one of them. Judas betrayed, Peter denied, the other ten fled, the women stayed at a distance, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus only stepped up after the fact, and the crowd – which had been so joyously supportive of Jesus on Sunday – sided with the religious and political powers to insist that an innocent man was condemned to die.

The storytellers in the gospels are more ‘matter of fact’ than ‘condemning’ as they describe the utter failure of every single disciple. Judas gets a mixed review – some say “The Devil made him do it,” some say he was a bad apple from the start, and some say that he was immediately filled with regret, returning the blood money and hanging himself. Peter’s fall was mostly exacerbated because he had perched himself on too high of a pedestal to begin with. One of the stories gives him three chances to declare his loyalty to the risen Christ – which many read as opportunities to redeem each denial. The women probably had little choice in staying away – they weren’t allowed in many of the spaces where the action was taking place and Roman soldiers always posed a danger to women, especially when they were already feeling the bloodlust of displaying cruelty. The point of the stories seems not to be that this person or that person was especially unfit (except some of the descriptions of Judas). The overall point is that none of us is fit to stand by, to follow, to accompany the one who is betrayed, abandoned, and crucified.

So, how should a person of faith spend Good Friday? And, for us, how shall we spend Good Friday when our normal patterns of life today are disrupted? Some of you are spending this day doing marvelous works of service – in hospitals, in caretaking roles, in “essential services,” or in simply keeping it together for yourself and others. Bless you in that work. Some of you are grieving a loss, compounded by the inability to gather and offer one another solace. Bless you in that loss. If service or grief is your work today, you are immersed in the meaning of Good Friday already. Bless you.

For those of us who have the time and freedom to consider the meaning of Good Friday, let’s not spend this time feeling “guilty.” If my instructors in facing White Privilege have taught me anything, it is that when we respond to hard truth with “guilt,” we change the emphasis from the one who has suffered to our own fragile feelings. Let’s not do guilt this Good Friday. Instead, let’s embrace the gospels’ candor: When the call to discipleship means following Christ through his rejection and suffering, every single disciple fails. Including us. How great it is, then, that God still loves us, that Easter still awaits us, that it is precisely on the rickety staves of folks like us that God has built the church. Knowing that we are numbered among those who fail enables us to look with greater love and appreciation to the one who did not fail. Today is about that one who, even in the depths of human suffering, did not abandon God’s purpose and did not abandon us. Truly the folk tune says – as a declaration and not as a question – What Wondrous Love Is This.

Mark of St. Mark