A joint effort- Leah’s structure, liturgy and music…Mark’s stark reflections.
Firstly a photograph taken by Leah on Monday evening of Holy Week after everyone had gone home… not great in focus but taken in the church, it was dark, and flash erased the shadow!!
Good Friday Order of Service 2010
The text not on the Order of Service is below.
Hymn – Come and see
- “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”
Luke 23:34
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” He said it as they finished crucifying him, when they began playing games of chance to see who would get his clothes. When they had nailed him to the wood and hoisted him up, once the pain had subsided enough for him to speak and take in what was going on around him. And he looked down on a group of soldiers casting lots for a few clothes. A dead man’s clothes. His clothes.
Because that’s the moment when you’d realise. You were already dead. None of the soldiers and torturers was going to do anything more to you. Just leave you there nailed to a cross to die. Even your interest as a victim had faded now. They were more concerned with your clothes. What would you do? What would you think? What would you say? Words of defiance? Or despair?
When he looked down on these men, the ones who had driven the nails through his hands moments before, who were now gambling to win his clothes, he looked not with hatred or judgement, still less with the detachment that comes from despair. This was a man who remained connected, caring, despite everything. He didn’t see evil-doers, he saw people trapped by evil they couldn’t escape or even understand. He didn’t want to judge them, but to forgive them. This was why he had come. This was why he was here. It wasn’t just the soldiers at the foot of the cross he said these words to, he said it to all of us. Because all of us have been like those soldiers at some time or another: inflicting pain on others without thinking. Looking on them as just a job to be done, as a way we can get something we want. Not seeing people. Not trying to understand their pain. Not looking beyond our own horizons.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”
Silence
Music- You led me to the cross by Matt Redman.
- “Woman, here is your son”
John 19: 26&7
To his mother: “Woman, here is your son.” To his best friend: “Son, here is your mother.” He said it as the crowds had moved away, the taunts had finished, the soldiers had finished divvying up the spoils. It wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t even very interesting. It was just long. It takes a long time to die. Like being born. Although there are moments of drama and there is certainly pain, a lot of it is just about the waiting. Casual bystanders had their fill of it after a while. The only ones who stayed were the ones paid to be there and the ones who couldn’t bear to leave.
What goes through your mind as you become accustomed to the painful logic of crucifixion? – The pain from the nails in hands and feet, from the open wounds from the scourging on your back against the rough wood, the burning pain from your arms suspended above you, the difficulty in finding any position in which the pain was relieved, and the slow realisation that this was to be the character of your last hours. There is time to become accustomed to it, time to wonder what would finally kill you – would you slip away slowly with your lifeblood, or quickly as you found yourself unable to breathe? Would you die from the infection of your open wounds? Or from dehydration as you hung nailed out in the sun? There is time to wonder how it will happen, to even long for it. To focus on anything else would require immense effort.
And yet he does. Not, at least for now, focusing on his great mission, the path that has lead him to this place. He focuses on the people still standing there in front of him. On Mary. On his mother. In the midst of his suffering, he recognises hers. She has known this moment or something like it was coming, told when he was a baby that a sword would pierce her heart because of him. Now, horrifically, she sees her greatest fears come true. And next to her stands the only one of the twelve who has not fled in fear. John. He stands there, perhaps unable to leave him. Perhaps unable to leave Mary. To these two, who he knows will find the days to come agonising, he gives the only thing he can: he gives them each other:
“Woman, your son.” “Son, your mother.”
Silence
Hymn – When I survey (celtic)
- “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Matthew 27:46 / Mark 15: 34
“Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” There had been three hours of darkness. Three hours. An unnaturally long time. Long enough to wonder what on earth it meant, this darkness, as the man hung and died on the cross. So when he spoke these words out of the gloom, four words after hours of silence, no wonder that it caught people by surprise. No wonder that they got the wrong end of the stick. They thought it was the end of the world. They thought the prophet Elijah was returning, the one who had gone up to heaven in a chariot of fire. Whoever they thought Jesus might be, they thought the greatest prophet in the world might be returning to save him.
They were wrong. Jesus wasn’t calling out for Elijah. But he like them recognised that this darkness was no freak natural occurance. It was a sign of the end of the world. The end of their world. The world they knew was dying, as surely as the man on the cross. And his death would bring it crashing down. The man hung and died on the cross, despised, rejected, tortured and killed, God turned away, and darkness fell. It was the end of the world. And Jesus, suffering and dying, was at the eye of the storm. In the silence, as the soldiers gathered worriedly around their fire, he was meditating on a psalm he had known since he was a boy.
The words he called out would bring it to the minds of any who knew their scriptures. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?” It is a song of anguished hope, a song from the lips of a despised and afflicted man determined to trust in the future despite all that happens to him. A man who trusts that even though he suffers, a new day is coming, where the God who seems so absent now will be praised by all, and rule over the whole earth: “They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, for he has done it.” This is what he meditated upon as he hung there in the darkness. As he hung there and God seemed far away and all he could feel was pain.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Music- Agnus Dei from Missa Pape Marceli by Palestrina
Veneration of the cross
Hymn – O sacred head
- “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit”
Luke 23:46
“Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit.” Jesus’ last words were words of trust. As he had prayed in the garden, he had drunk the cup of suffering he would rather had passed from him. He had obeyed his Father’s will rather than his own. It is on some levels easy to understand the human suffering of Jesus. Even if you have never experienced the level of pain he did, you know what enduring pain is like. But there is a part of his suffering that is truly hard to understand: the choice to suffer at all. For any normal person this choice does not exist. Once Judas had betrayed him, once the soldiers had seized him, it seems he had no control, no choice. He was bound, tortured, killed. Nothing he could have said or done would have convinced the High Priests to let him go. But Jesus was more than a man, he was God. When his disciples tried to save him from the guards by force, he refused, saying that a legion of angels would save him if he wanted it. When the bystanders taunted him with the invitation to leap down from the cross if he really were the Son of God, it was a more real temptation than they knew.
He had to choose to suffer, to choose to die. Because at any moment he could have refused to. He could have leapt down from the cross. He could have destroyed his enemies with a thought, never lifting a finger. He could have chosen not to feel the pain. He could have chosen not to die. He had strength more than human to call upon should he choose to use it. But he did not. To do that would be to betray the whole purpose of his coming. He had come as a human being, able to know pain, able to know doubt, able to know fear. He had come to be one of us. And he had to stay human until the end. That was his Father’s will – that he should be human. So he remained human, remained suffering, remained dying. He was human until at last he faced the most human of all experiences: death. God cannot die. But Jesus chose to die.
For all those long hours he had suffered on the cross, knowing pain, knowing the fear of death. Choosing to do so, choosing to be human every second, choosing to trust his Father every second. He had reached the end of his strength. He knew the end was near. He had endured the pain, the despair, even the darkness of his Father’s absence, and still trusted. There was nothing left to do but to go on trusting and die.
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Silence
Departure
