LENT 2020: Day 39: Good Friday

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• Friday, April 10, 2020: Good Friday
  Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10.16-25; John 18.1-19.42

     How lovely on the mountains
          the steps of the bearer of good tidings,
    announcing peace, heralding good things,
          announcing triumph,
              saying to Zion: Your God reigns.

This, argues Brueggemann, is “a radical political announcement,” for Second Isaiah is writing in the midst of the exile. 

“The One...dismissed as useless and impotent,” Brueggemann writes, “has claimed his throne. And he has done so right in exile; right under the nose of the Babylonians.”

“The poet engages in the kind of guerilla warfare that is always necessary on behalf of the oppressed people,” Brueggemann argues.

And this is exactly what Good Friday is all about: guerilla warfare against the Roman Empire.

Jesus, executed, is dismissed as useless and impotent, but on the cross he claims his throne...right under the nose of the Romans.

But that is to get ahead of the story, that is to skip to Easter.

For now, though, we are stuck with the cry of the Psalmist, which becomes the cry of Jesus on the cross:
    My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Jurgen Moltmann argues that “the cry of Jesus...means not only ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ but at the same time, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken thyself?”

Moltmann continues: “The abandonment on the cross which separates the Son from the Father is something which takes place within God himself; it is stasis within God — ‘God against God.’”

“To comprehend God in the crucified Jesus, abandoned by God, requires a ‘revolution in the concept of God,’” argues Moltmann.

By which he means this: “In the fact of Jesus’ death-cry to God, theology either becomes impossible or becomes possible only as specifically Christian theology.”

And then Moltmann asks two questions: “How can Christian theology speak of God at all in the face of Jesus’ abandonment by God? How can Christian theology not speak of God in the face of the cry of Jesus for God on the cross?”

And Moltmann leaves us with this observation: “The life of Jesus ends with an open question concerning God.”

Jesus is dead.

What does that mean about God?

At the end of Good Friday, we don’t know.

That would seem to leave us with despair.

But in the midst of exile, Brueggemann observes, Second Isaiah’s words transform: “Funeral becomes festival, grief becomes doxology, and despair turns to amazement.”

The prophet doesn’t wait for liberation to announce to Zion:
    Your God reigns.

Likewise, we don’t have to wait for Easter to announce the same.

And so the prophet ends with this good news:

     My servant shall put the righteous in the right for many,
          and their crimes he shall bear.
    Therefore I will give him shares among the many,
          and with the might he shall share out spoils,
    for he laid himself bare to death
          and was counted among the wrongdoers,
    and it is he who bore the offense of many
          and interceded for wrongdoers.