he dies to enter death

This and the postings that follow are a series of reflections that originally appeared here, on the Diocese of Dunedin website "worship" page

Good Friday

April 10th

READING: for full Passion, see John 18:1 - 19:42. Here I reproduce only the final verses ...

Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

REFLECTION

It’s worth remembering, on this day as we recall the death of Jesus, that the date is still writ large in many New Zealanders’ lives as the day on which many lives were terminated prematurely in the wreck of the Wahine. Like, in New Zealand consciousness, Erebus, like the Christchurch earthquake, like the Christchurch shootings, or in world consciousness 9/11, there are events by which our assumptions of invulnerability are rent asunder, and we are cast into what the psalmist calls the valley of the shadow of death.

I noted yesterday John’s desire to portray divine control over the events of the Passion. But John, who probably was an eyewitness (to the extent that anyone was) of these final events of the incarnate life of Jesus, is too sensitive a human being to fail to let the deep humanity of the scene break through. The grief of the whanau and closest friends of Jesus was immeasurable—as is the grief of every parent who watches their child die, the grief of every member of a previous generation who watches their successors die (and with them all hope of renewal), the  grief of every human who has watched their closest soul-mate die. John portrays divine control of the events, but depths of divine feeling, too: “woman,” (the term had more tenderness than we can convey here) “Here is your son … here is your mother.” Mary, widowed, bereft of her first-born, ran the risk of the scrapheap. The dying Jesus, embodying love, compassion, justice, would have none of it, and pronounced his final wish. Then, in surrendering to this loneliest of deaths, further scripture is fulfilled (this was important to John), and Jesus dies.

He dies, as I have said previously, as countless are dying now: exposed, deserted, isolated (and this is no reflection on medical teams who will do all they can to comfort and sedate the lonely dying). He dies not somehow to wash us in blood, though that is one metaphor that has sometimes and in some contexts been useful, but to enter our death. He dies to enter our death and every death; lonely deaths, frightened deaths, complacent deaths, triumphant deaths, your death and mine.

And there we will leave him, just as so many of us have had to and will have to leave our loved ones. Let us sit with the pain. Nightfall will come, but the darkness of John 13:30 has never really dissipated, despite the intervening hours, nor will it yet. Let us sit with the pain.