We know this story so well, that it has a life of its own, event follows event with a sense of inevitability, we know what’s coming next at every point. Over time, it seems to us that it couldn’t have been any other way.
But Jesus’s death was the most avoidable death imaginable. At every turning point in this story, there’s an opportunity for Jesus to escape his crucifixion. He could have avoided Jerusalem entirely. He could have snuck through one of the legal loopholes that Pilate seemed, at some level, to want to offer him. He could have laid low for a year or two until things settled down. But he didn’t. So instead of calling his death an inevitable fate, we have to call it a choice.
Who would ever choose death? No one, if the alternative were life. But that choice between life and death isn’t always so simple. Good Friday is called “Good” because it tells us that in death, we can find life — that in not avoiding death, we get closer to a source of life that we can never be near any other way.
A lot of people are still prejudiced against our faith because they hear things that make it sound like we’re masochists, that we want to avoid pleasure in most forms and deliberately seek out things that are unpleasant. That is not the life of Jesus. Jesus did not seek out ways to keep himself miserable, he surrounded himself with friends and companions, like we do, he ate and drank and was not always engaged with seeking out new ways to disrupt his life and confront death. But Good Friday reminds us that Jesus did not live in some fantasy world of faith where the deep imperfection and illness of the world isn’t real, isn’t part of our lives each day. Today Jesus tells us that not only can we not avoid death, but that we need to embrace it, and acknowledge it, and live near to it if we are ever to live a real life. We are not here to be miserable, but there is no life in avoiding death.
Death is all around us, not our physical death, but the death that you can feel in a sickroom, or in a prison, or in a crumbling North Philadelphia school, or in the ramblings of an old person, or in the Sudan. It is all around us, and yet as human beings we are dedicated to keeping it at bay. We can avoid all those places where death seems so strong, we keep ourselves busy with work, and entertainment, and planning, we move to places where it seems death is not as close to us, we do all that instead of being there where death is doing its work, knowing that God is with us when we do in a way that God is with us at no other time.
A dear friend of mine died of cancer last year. I still miss her very much — her death took a lot of life out of this world. But she wrote something about her suffering and her death, that I think shows this unlikely way we Christians have to live both death and life. She said, If I think of my suffering only as an obstacle in my real life, then I wear an unbearably heavy yoke. But if I can accept the fact that cancer is part of my real life, one aspect of my identity and my authentic destiny, then I come closer to putting on the easy yoke. Personally, I get irritated when people say things like, “God never gives us more than we can bear,” or, “There’s a reason for everything.” I often feel like I have a great deal more than I can bear. But I find that when I look directly at the reality of my situation as a person with cancer, I am looking God right in the eye.
We often don’t have a choice about how death and suffering come to us. And the joy of life is just as much where we belong as in its pain. But the pain is holy just as the joy is holy, and today is the day we remember that Jesus, who could so easily have avoided death, chose to face it head on, to give us an example of how to live.