Anyone who is in recovery from addiction, or knows someone in recovery, knows that the journey back from death’s door begins when you hit rock bottom – when you have lost more of the things that matter to you than you can possibly bear to lose, and you feel utterly helpless in the powerful grip of your addiction.
Good Friday is that “rock bottom” day for humanity. God came to us in the flesh to invite us to walk away from the powers of death – to abandon war, and greed, and the thirst for power, and lack of compassion, and insecurity, and pride, and fear, and every vain desire and striving that separates us from God and from one another – and to follow our God into a new life of love and compassion and generosity. But we were so addicted to power and wealth and our own sense of being right; so overcome by fear; so addicted to death, in fact, that we killed the God who made and loved us rather than abandoning our power and our wealth and our fear and our violence.
That is the stark fact, and that is the dark emptiness of this day; our worst day; our rock bottom day. With the death of Jesus we lost far more than any of us can bear to lose.
But that is not the whole story. The truth of this day, the reason we call this Friday ‘good,’ is that our God did not return our hatred with hatred, or with vengeance, or even with justice. Our God took our hate and our fear and kept it – did not give it back, and in so doing, Jesus made himself into a door through which that hate and fear could escape the world. By answering hate with love, even unto death, Jesus made it possible for us to recover from hate, from fear, from violence, from war, from the lust for power. By answering hate with love, Jesus made resurrection possible.
From the cross, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The words might better be ours than his. But the cry of despair that begins Psalm 22 is not the last word. The Psalmist, in the midst of unbearable grief, remembers that God has always been faithful, has seen others through their grief and despair and, in the end, trusts that God will do the same again.
The hope that we bear on this day – the reason we venerate the cross, and wear it as a badge of honor – could be summed up in the words of Mercer University’s Rick Wilson: “Resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing.”
The worst thing is never the last thing.
Our journeys do not end at the bottom. Every sorrow, every anger, every fear, every “rock bottom” day we have, we can lay on the cross with our flowers and our prayers and our hearts, and know that God has something in store for us beyond “rock bottom.” We could not, in the end, kill our God, or even turn our God against us. The hatred and fear and anger and greed and death that humankind laid on Jesus was not the last word for him, and because of him it will not be the last word for us.
Amen.