Good Friday

Spiritual Practices for Eastertide – Friday, April 15, 2022

Cedric von Niederhausern

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Preparing for Eastertide

Though there will be offerings of hope throughout the 50 days spanning from Easter Sunday to Pentecost, it’s good to prepare our hearts, souls and minds for the journey ahead. 

Last week we did the Stations of the Cross. This week we will focus on the light and darkness of death and resurrection with small simple practices. 

Peace and Blessings
Marcie

* We’ll take a break for Easter weekend. We’ll gather again in community right here on Monday, April 18th! —Happy Easter

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Good Friday

The most perplexing of all Holy Days is Good Friday. How can the public execution of an innocent man be holy? How can murder be reverent and sacred? I’m astonished at how easily we embrace Jesus’ death without question. I’m mortified that we spend such very little thought about its vulgarity that we actually have made movies and plays to pantomime someone we love being put to death. 

But Jesus’ death was not an ordinary death. Though the method of his execution by crucifixion was quite standard for his time, the mentality and events that led to it were extraordinary, and what happened afterwards even more extraordinary. I believe it was so extraordinary that it was super-terrestrial—completely otherworldly. 

I no longer think too heavily about the murder of Jesus on Good Friday. I don’t think so much about the cross, the blood, the thorns, the sweat, the vinegar or the tears. I think about the galaxies and the stars. I think about Genesis 1:2 and how in the beginning there was nothing but a bottomless emptiness, a darkness, a void, an abyss, a dark fog, a shapeless and desolate chaos, a soup of nothingness. I think of the swirling vortex of blankness that covered Jesus as he laid in the tomb before the boulder was rolled away. 

I look into the dark night sky and think of black holes, dark matter and dark energy,  and I wonder what Jesus could tell me about these things. I’m convinced that for three days he intimately knew what physicists have always asked: “What is this seemingly boundless this-ness?” Likewise, I’m sure Jesus could answer the questions that have always perplexed those of us who search and ponder the spiritual meaning of all things. 

Physicist Leonard Susskind said, “The biggest events in history [are] when principles that you deeply believe clash… when principles clash, that’s where progress is made.”

Of course he’s talking about the history of theoretical physics, but my goodness, doesn’t this apply to just about all history that we hold—particularly the history that we know of Jesus? What’s more clashing than a human who was both man and God, both dead and alive? And just look at the progress this story has made. 

On his TV show Closer to the Truth, public intellectual Robert Lawrence Kuhn ponders many of the questions I do: What is this world all about? How do science and religion correlate to one another? How vast is this universe? Where is God? 

Physicists know there is matter out there that we cannot see that is larger than the matter that we can see. Or, as famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, “We can make all manner of measurements and not know what we're measuring."  

I think this is how we should approach the tomb, the cross and the resurrection. We can make all manner of measurements about Jesus’ death and resurrection—3 days in the tomb, 7 sayings from the cross, 15 stations of the cross—but still not know what we’re measuring. 

The cosmic beauty of believing is to measure for the joy of measuring, but to allow the messiness of the mystery, awe, and wonder that lies within the paradox between what we see and know, and what we can’t see and can’t know. 

The goodness of Good Friday is the profundity of the measurable unseen and unknown.

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Here are some beautiful videos for any of you who are fellow cosmology geeks—Happy viewing and many blessings!

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Song of Praise

Crucifixus by Antonio Lotti – Performed by Tenebrae conducted by Nigel Short

Lyrics 

Latin
Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato:
Passus, et sepultus est.

Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas.
Et ascendit in coelum: sedet ad dexteram Patris.
Et iterum venturus est cum gloria judicare vivos et mortuos;
Cujus regni non erit finis.

English
He was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate:
He suffered and was buried.

And on the third day he rose again, according to the scriptures.
And ascended into heaven: and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.
And he shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead;
Whose kingdom shall have no end.

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Benediction 

O Spacious God, have mercy on us.
O Creator hear us. 

O Lady Wisdom, have mercy on us. 
O Spirit, hear us. 

O The Anointed Son, have mercy on us.
O Christ, hear us. 

Amen

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This is a communal practice. Please feel welcome to add your prayers, thoughts, questions or reflections in the comments below. 

Shalom.