Holy Day of Brokenness

April 10 – Good Friday

Readings: Is 52:13—53:12; Heb 4:14-16; 5:7-9; Jn 18:1—19:42

Christians all over the world join together today to remember the “passion” of Jesus.  I love that word because Jesus was a man of passion and the pain and suffering he endured is also referred to as his passion.  My sense is that this is a characteristic of living whole-heartedly – we feel and experience it all!

You do not have to look far to know that we live in a broken world.  In so many ways, I see Good Friday as the “holy day” of brokenness.  For me it is a time to mourn and lament all of the pain and suffering in this world that has come about through ignorance, violence, misunderstanding, greed, betrayal, etc.  It is a day to acknowledge everything that was cut short too soon or cut off.  It is everything that we wished had happened (or failed to happen) and all the stuff we can’t control or change.  It is just a hard day.

It was into this broken world that Jesus arrived. 

Yet instead of trying to fight the brokenness, he decided to embrace it and be with it.  In Jesus, God decided to embody a love that would endure the brokenness. No scapegoats.  No blame game.  No retribution.  No running away from it. 

This is transformative love.

I think that most of us have had relationships – with parents, children, significant others, families, coworkers – where we have endured things and suffered the consequences of love – without punishing the other person and without resentment.  This is never easy.  We keep loving and stay in the tension even knowing that we may not see the final chapter of the story.  No one requires it of us.  We just do it because it is what we do in love.

I also think of so many people throughout history – with all of the historical trauma, addiction, abuse, family hurt, separation and collective pain that we have inherited – who vow that, to the best of our ability, the pain stops with us.  We decide to not pass it on to anyone else and literally metabolize it somehow.  As Richard Rohr says, “Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.”

Today we encounter a God who decides to transform the pain and is with us in it.  Yet even though God is with us and understands our pain, we are not prevented from experiencing it.  And that’s the hard news of today.  

Obviously, we have the benefit of knowing that the story of Jesus doesn’t end here, but the disciples did not.  All they knew was that their dreams were shattered and their friend was gone.  They felt scared, lost, numb and afraid.  There is no way to sugar coat it that sometimes – and for many quite often – the world leaves us raw and hurting.

For today, offer up everything that is broken in the world, in your life and in your heart.  Feel the sadness.  Like the disciples, we do not know the end of the story, but we trust that something else will emerge.  It just doesn’t emerge today…