Before this, everything was clear. God was God. People knew where to look to find God. It was a world of stark contrasts. The way you knew God was on your side was that you prospered in life, lived long and healthy, were free from oppression, got what you deserved. Your enemy, on the other hand, was vanquished. When this happened, it was a sign that God was present. When it didn’t, it was a sign that God’s favor had been withdrawn from you, until a time when it might suit God to relent — or perhaps, it just meant that God for some reason no longer cared.
Think of the Israelites escaping the Egyptians, who were crushed by God as they rushed through the Red Sea to pursue them. Israel was still waiting for it to happen again, relief from the Romans, their kingdom restored, power and independence. That was how they would know that God was still with them. God delivered victory. God delivered results you could see.
Today though, that story, that way of looking at God, is over. Today we find out something about God that we would never have known unless this happened.
There were signs that the way Israel tended to see God, and the way many of us, in some way, still see him was not the whole story. The first reading, the story of the suffering servant, told five hundred years before Jesus, was a vision of something new, and something that is still hard to square with what we think of when we hear the word “God.” It tells us that the story won’t be complete until we understand that we have a God who not only sympathizes with our suffering, who goes beyond comforting us, none of that would be enough. We have a God who literally sacrifices himself in the same way our ancestors used to sacrifice animals. Apparently there needs to be real blood shed in order to convince us that God is not a spectator, not a distant observer, not a director, not someone who simply pretended to be one of us for a few years, but completely with us, in some way that we still can hardly imagine.
We all go through times when our lives seem closer to death than usual. Maybe like me, you have been to more funerals in the past year than seemed right, or fair. Maybe you have been torn by seeing so much bloodshed, so much suffering brought on by war, and you wonder what winning and losing really mean. The world is filled with wrongs that are not righted, with unspeakable things that God shouldn’t allow to happen. Today, we don’t get an explanation. We don’t find out why. But we see and feel the mind and the heart of the God who put us here, and we see what God is willing to do to be part of this with us, to deliver us from fear.
Every year, the adults who are baptized in this church ask a lot of questions about our faith that need to be asked. This year one of them, who will be baptized into this faith tomorrow night, asked a simple question about today that is the real question: What’s so “good” about Good Friday? It’s this: The day of God operating at a distance, favoring one person over the other, one people over another, that day, if there ever was such a day, is over. God is here with everyone who wonders about death, is angry about it, worries about it, fears it. Our deliverance from suffering and loss won’t come in this world. But we have been completely, finally, once and for all, delivered from its power to harm us, by God’s willingness to suffer it with us.