We pray: Holy God, risen Lord, on the day we pray for
your blessing as we hear your word to us – grant us ears to hear, hearts to be
open and minds to seek your way for us.
In Jesus name. Amen
What a day it
is! Daylight saving ends, April Fool’s
day – and Easter Sunday! The last day
that we had April Fools and Easter on the same day was in 1956 and the next
time 2029.
I am guessing that
the irony of this might well be spoken of from pulpits around the country and
the world. A sigh of relief at a natural
‘in’ to the sermon, you might say. You can use the story of the disbelieving
Thomas, fed up with being caught by the jokesters and refusing to believe until
it can be proven. Of the doubting men
who were his disciples – surely it can’t be true, of the women convinced but
not convincing.
But as you start
walking around this and other thoughts:
of the foolishness of an empty grave,
or the obvious hoax of a man supposedly beating death
(and the laws of nature),
of God’s April fool’s joke actually being true,
you begin to
wonder if there is actually another layer we need to think about. You begin to wonder if the story of the
resurrection is not actually the source of the foolishness of God – that it is
instead the events of Good Friday.
Our disbelief, our
shock that Jesus was subject to human pain and suffering, vulnerable to the
whim of earthly vengeance and frustrated priests and rulers - surely this must
be the hoax. God’s son, come to earth, weak and helpless in the cradle and on
the cross.
Paul has some
thoughts on this – when he first met Jesus it was on the road – we remember
that story of the blinding light and the thunderous voice saying: ‘Saul, Saul,
why do you persecute me?’
Could it be that
Paul (as he became) was more astounded by the foolishness of the thought that
God could identify with persecution than the appearance of the resurrected
Christ? That he had to turn his thinking completely upside down and realise
that every time he threw people into prison, he was not just incarcerating
those he considered fools but he was actually wounding God.
That this God he
thought he knew as cloaked in splendour, filled with heavenly light and powerful
beyond comprehension was in fact one who knew what it was like to be subjected
to complete humiliation, naked and bleeding on a cross.
Paul writes to the
church in Corinth about the foolishness of the cross and that it is in this
foolishness that we find our hope. That
is where the joke lies, he says. In the
end, says Paul, ‘…we proclaim Christ crucified – a stumbling block to Jews and
foolishness to Gentiles.’[1]
The fundamental
marker of Jesus identity lies in the events of Good Friday and is lived out
through the miracle of resurrection.
Easter Sunday is the day of celebration of God with us, of hope reborn
and salvation newly born in us through the humiliating events of Good Friday.
We are an Easter
people and ours is an Easter faith!
I would share the
words of Joy Cowley – her poem ‘Good Friday’[2]
We do not call it
Bad Friday
although, for the
one who lived and died
the torture of
that day
there would have
been nothing good about it.
It was death by
dishonour,
death by a pain so
severe
that it filled all
the spaced of thinking,
wrenching forth
the cry,
“My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”
This One, this
Christ who used nature
to describe
eternal truths,
who spoke of the
cycle of the seasons
with images of
grains of wheat,
fields, lilies,
sparrows, grapes, figs,
fishes, sheep and
flowing water,
this One was too
steeped in agony
to remember that
even the rarest flower
must die to
produce a seeding.
But we who bear
the gift
of his life and
death and life,
call it Good
Friday
and carry with us
the knowledge that
in him,
all our
crucifixions
are but our
resurrections unborn.
We take a moments
of silence and then we will come to the table that Jesus invites us to, in all
our Good Friday and Easter Sunday experiences, for it is here that, in unity,
we bear witness to the truth of the crucified and risen Lord. Amen.
Margaret Garland
