We could be forgiven if we come here today completely confused about what kind of a God we really have. Who would have expected, one year ago, that we would now be looking back on a year of wars that are called holy, a year of suicide bombings and murder in the name of religion, a year when our church itself has proven, if it needed proving, that it is not the holder of all truth and good judgment. So much suffering. So little reason for it. No clear way to end it. So many people thinking God is on their side. We think that God must have turned away, from protecting his people, from protecting us, from protecting anyone. And therefore, very logically, we turn away as well.
Suffering, after all, can be avoided rather easily, we can spend our lives finding little ways to avoid seeing it, risking it, watching it. We keep ourselves busy, we move to places where it seems death is not as close to us, we tell ourselves how little we can really do. But God tells us today, through this completely avoidable crucifixion and death that Jesus could so easily have stepped aside from, God tells us that our plan of looking aside from death is not life. This God who in the Old Testament promised us victory, and triumph, and the vanquishing of all our enemies now tells us that that victory will only come in a way we never expected. There is no life in living a life of self-preservation. The only response to everything we see, the only life there is at all, is the life of a servant.
We are right to be afraid of the role of the servant. It puts us in the midst of this world of people who are hostile to us, hostile to one another, suffering and hurting one another for no good reason. In this chaos and conflict and discouragement, servants have to take on the work no one else wants to do, poorly paid work, thankless work, work that the prophet Isaiah says can make a servant an outcast, even a laughing stock. Servants may be the people who do the ugly, dirty, quiet work of caring and healing. But they may also be the people who stubbornly deliver their master’s message when no one wants to hear it. They may be the prophets who make themselves unpopular by stubbornly calling a spade a spade in a workplace, or a country, or a church. There are many ways to be a servant, but there is no being a real servant without loneliness, loss, trouble, and with the trouble, comes God, running to embrace us.
That is why today is “Good” Friday,. not because suffering is good, but because before today it was never clear how close God is willing to come to us. That, of course, is the only answer we get to the question of why God seems so quiet in this world, not why it’s that way, but where God is for us. It is as if today God has traded the role of distant king and warrior and manipulator of great events for the role of suffering servant here with us, not suffering so that we won’t have to, but suffering so that our suffering can give us life. This day of death is really the day of God’s joining hands with us as if for the first time.
In the three other passion readings we hear, from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we hear that at the moment of Jesus’s death, the curtain of the temple in Jerusalem was torn from top to bottom. We can often read this as a sign of violence, of God’s displeasure, But remember that the curtain in the temple was the great dividing line between God and us, it marked the barrier beyond which the people in the temple could go no further in approaching the holiness of God. There is no curtain now. What kind of servants could we be, if we really believed that God were not as distant as we keep him, but instead, the one who is willing to do anything to see us learn how to live.