Some Good Fridays touch us personally.

If there has been a recent death in your circle, in your family, in your friendship circles or in your various communities at work or groups, Good Friday may touch you and awaken all that yet unattended grief.

If you’re unwell, sometimes Good Friday can make us  more unstable, more fragile, more vulnerable, more aware of our mortality…

If your primary relationship is dry, or fragile or cracking, then Good Friday can add more challenge.

Maybe, you’re overtired. Over worked. Over stressed. Over everything.

Good Friday comes and asks us to pay attention to this Universal Story.

Jesus was killed in a brutal manner: in a way dreamt up by humans to cause personal humiliation and public coercion and control: a state sanctioned murder.  And it’s still going on.

Humans do terrible things.  It’s you and me we confront in this story.

When the mystery we call God, comes into the human story in Jesus: it is a dangerous thing.  Incarnation is a word we use for the presence in this fully human realm; a word to describe a sense of relationship with the divine.   And in all we know of Jesus’ life, living, and teachings; in his call, connecting people together, bridging societal divides of  race, gender, and difference: in his bringing the outcasts home and back into relationship: even then, humans will continue to inflict not only death. but even a de-humanzing death … because of what? What was it that Jesus did to install such fear? Was it the the loss of power? Control? Authority?

Or  was it that the  thought of love over difference was  too hard to consider?

The work of love is tough going.   Loving and managing difference takes courage.

The life witness we have of Jesus’ ministry demonstrates a pathway of being that embodies personal integrity, a belief structure that shows am ability to change attitude or understanding, and a BIG picture of the love of God.

When it seems our world stands in such divisions, and there is impasse after impasse: and ideologies that reduce human capacity for understanding, we, as Christian people, can loose our own hope.

We could revert to simplistic religion that seeks an ‘Almighty power’ to come and solve the problems for us.  Christians have done that before and forgotten today’s story.  On the one hand speaking words of a loving God: and in the other telling a nonsensical narrative of divine retribution and atonement, which therefore permits the same violence in real life; which is entirely NOT what the Good Friday story is about.

As Rev. Dr Sally Douglas says, “Divine mercy cannot be pinned down by destruction, by the bullies, or by the grave, but instead is ceaselessly moving to confront violence and expose evil  (within and beyond us), and to birth us afresh into courage, creativity and compassion.” is the message of Good Friday.

The people who were the Early Church are sometimes honoured like they were a perfect paradigm of church: bathed in the forgiving love of God: like that had a special blessing we don’t have because of their nearness to the actual life of Jesus.  But, in that considering, we are forgetting their reality.  Galatians 3: 18 reminds us of their real lives, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  

So this early Jesus’ community were attempting something beyond themselves.  The Jewish people of Jesus day had nothing to do with gentiles. Women and Men were segregated in life. Slaves and the Free never had relationships together.  And yet, the Easter experience brought them together forming a new community.  The New Testament stories of Early Church are people navigating difference of which they had no societal skills to apply. 

Now, think of our world presently; and wonder what Good News we have to share.

This Good Friday, rather than a focus on our own personal circumstance of grief, loss, relational tension or health: this year, I leave you these thoughts: that in the God experience of Jesus’ death and these diametrically opposed people found a love that drew them together.  A forgiveness that paved a way for relationship. And a God who didn’t walk away from human violence: but a God, whose very nature is love; who requires of all who follow, to live into the mercy: Divine Mercy: and bring it to life where ever we are. Amen.