Bend Mennonite Church
Sam Adams - 3/31/2018
Text: Jn 19.38-42; Ps 31.1-4, 15-16
1. When the church has heard and learned the gospel rightly, it has always sided with the victims of the powerful. It has understood that the reality of the suffering world is a reality that must not be ignored, but rather must be addressed and confronted with action formed by a suffering love.
a. This week we’ve heard the story of Stephon Clark, another unarmed black man shot 8 times by police, all from the back, in his own backyard. In this and other cases like it, the church suffers with the family, mourns his loss, speaks truth to the powerful, and works for change.
b. Over the last month or so, we’ve seen videos of border patrol agents kicking over stashes of water in the southwestern desert placed there by humanitarian groups, oftentimes the church, as relief for immigrants making the dangerous crossing into the US.
c. Over the last few years we have seen the horrific results of war in Syria—and now in Yemen—that has sent hundreds of thousands of people from their homes to find some sort of refuge in a world that, to a large part, doesn't want them. “One in every 113 people on Earth has now been driven from their home by persecution, conflict and violence or human rights violations.” NPR , 2016.
d. Psalm 31:1-4, 15-16
In you, O LORD, I seek refuge; do not let me ever be put to shame; in your righteousness deliver me.
Incline your ear to me; rescue me speedily. Be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me.
You are indeed my rock and my fortress; for your name's sake lead me and guide me,
take me out of the net that is hidden for me, for you are my refuge.
My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors.
Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love.
e. The church, when it has heard and learned the gospel rightly, has seen, in the suffering of the world, the presence of God in and with those who suffer.
f. It has not—when it has heard and learned the gospel rightly—seen the presence of God with the agents of power, of law and order.
g. Jesus’ ministry, the ministry of Immanuel, God with us, begins with these words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4.18-19
2. Today is Holy Saturday. This is a unique opportunity for us to reflect on what it means to confess that Jesus, God with us, is in the tomb, “crucified, dead and buried.”
a. First: On this day we don’t abandon what we learned at Advent: Jesus is God with us.
b. This event: looking back to the cross, and now at the tomb, is an event in the very life of God.
i. We do not believe that Jesus is two persons: one human, one divine. He is one person, both fully human and fully divine. Therefore, the person who is Jesus, experiences death. God, in this way, experiences death.
ii. Even to the extent that we confess that Jesus is a distinct person from the Father, yet we confess that are both the one God. Therefore, we must confess that in some way God the Father experiences death in the death of the Son. (Perichoresis?)
iii. God has entered history and now part of that history is death.
c. This death in the very life of God has been the source for helping make sense of human suffering for 2000 years. In the African American community, the horrific experience of lynching by white crowds was given ‘meaning’ by drawing on the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Consider this poem “Christ Recrucified” by Countee Cullen (1922):
"The South is crucifying Christ again
By all the laws of ancient rote and rule;
The ribald cries of “Save yourself” and “Fool”
Din in his ears; the thorns grope for his brain,
And where they bite, swift springing rivers stain
His gaudy, purple robe of ridicule
With sullen red; and acid wine to cool
His thirst is thrust at him, with lurking pain.
Christ’s awful wrong is that he’s dark of hue,
The sin for which no blamelessness atones;
But lest the sameness of the cross should tire;
They kill him now with famished tongues of fire,
And while he burns, good men, and women, too,
Shout, battling for his black and brittle and bones."
3. There is something else to be said for Holy Saturday that goes beyond what is said of the crucifixion. If the crucifixion is a scandal, like we said last week, then the entombment of Jesus is the silence of that scandal. If Good Friday is a remembrance of the dying and death of Jesus, then Holy Saturday is a remembrance of the silence of the tomb.
a. Job 14:1-14
"A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last. Do you fix your eyes on such a one? Do you bring me into judgment with you? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one can. Since their days are determined, and the number of their months is known to you, and you have appointed the bounds that they cannot pass, look away from them, and desist, that they may enjoy, like laborers, their days. "For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep. Oh that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your wrath is past, that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me! If mortals die, will they live again? All the days of my service I would wait until my release should come.
b. “Good Friday, it seems, marked not just the last day of Jesus and the end of his hopes, but the last day for all hope and for the cosmos as a whole: the apocalyptic end of everything.” (Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, 55.) But it wasn’t the end. Only Luke records what the disciples did: “On the Sabbath day they rested according to the commandment.” (Lk. 23.56b) Life went on.
c. “On the day after his death Jesus was no hero, savior, or redeemer. He is dead and gone, convicted as a sinner, a rebel and blasphemer, who has paid the price of tragic failure. He simply died, and his cause died with him, quite falsified and finished.” p. 45.
d. From Wendell Berry: “I read of Christ crucified, the only begotten Son sacrificed to flesh and time and all our woe. He died and rose, but who does not tremble for his pain, his loneliness, and the darkness of the sixth hour? Unless we grieve like Mary at His grave, giving Him up as lost, no Easter morning comes.” (“The Way of Pain,” Collected Poems, 210).
e. It is the very hopelessness of the entombment of Jesus that gives us the proper perspective through which to confront with open eyes, the hopelessness in the lives of people around us.
4. This is what needs to be said: At the heart of holy week there is this strange and echoing silence. This is the silence of despair. It is the silence of hopelessness. It is the silence of God. When Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” we see the depth of pain. When even after that prayer Jesus dies, is taken down off the cross, buried and sealed in a tomb, there we see the fullness of the godforsaken place to which Jesus went. God has endured the silence of God. This horrendous silence is experienced in the aftermath of tragedy when the tension of the horrific—the possibility and hope that it will not, finally, touch us—is over because it has touched us. The bombs have fallen. The desert is barren and has taken its victims. The loved son is shot and killed. Even there, in that darkest hour, that place of no hope; even that is a place to which God has gone. There is no place in heaven, in earth, or in hell, to which the God we worship has not gone.
5. Finally, in the midst of the quiet after tragedy, all we have left is God. If there is a glimmer of hope here at all, hope that we might hold on to, it must take the form of a question: What will God do? Or, better, in the form of prayer: God, what will you do?