All Shall Be Well

Good Friday Meditation, March, 2001

Norton, KS, First United Methodist Church

by Phyllis Roe

Here we are on this Good Friday, gathered around the cross as Christians around the world are doing. Of course we would prefer not to be here. We would rather avoid this place of suffering and loss, injustice and abandonment. We don't like death or anything associated with it.

We comfort ourselves with thoughts of Easter only a few days away so that the pain of Good Friday doesn't run too deeply. But for the surprise of joy on Easter Sunday to mean anything, we first have to stand here at the foot of the cross as those who loved and knew Jesus did, whose hopes and dreams were crushed on that day, whose hearts broke as their loved one suffered and died in front of their eyes, just as our hearts break when we stand at the bedside of a loved one and know that there will be no miracle recovery, that it is time for the life supports to be removed and death accepted.

As we're here with Christ and all who love him, we're also doing what those at the foot of the cross and all of us on the Good Fridays of our lives do: thinking about the lives of those who are dying, remembering the good times and regreting the times when things went wrong. We think about our own lives too, and our deaths and what it all means and where in the world God is in the midst of it all.

To explain Good Friday, to understand how a loving God could have permitted his son to die, is as elusive as explaining why anyone gets cancer, or dies young, or why there is violence and injustice in the world. In the suffering around our betrayals and losses, no explanation helps or makes sense. But if we sit here long enough we find, not explanation, but revelation. We see revealed here a different face of God - not a triumphant, victorious God who saves and rescues us, but a suffering God, one who goes into our places of pain and alienation and is there with us to show us the way home.

We think about Jesus' life and ministry. We know him as the One who consistently was there for the poor, the sick, the injured, the mentally disturbed, the disabled, the forgotten, those who were failures, those who were outcasts, those of us who feel despair and hopelessness. He was there for those who were strong and successful and pious ones too, it's just that they didn't recognize their need for his healing words as often.In Jesus' healing, teaching, forgiving life he brought back the lost, the lonely, the sick, those whose lives were in disarray, to relationship with God. Whatever it is in our lives that we thought separated us from God, there Jesus is to bring us back home, to say God is here also to be with you and love you.

On the path to the cross, Jesus' great compassion goes into that most threatening place of all - the place that for many threatens to destroy meaning and to separate us from the loving God we know - the place of pain, suffering, injustice and death.

Perhaps Jesus could have avoided this path. He could have hidden out, not told anyone where he was until things calmed down a bit, he didn't have to go to Jerusalem, he could have toned down what he was saying a bit. He chose instead to be all of who he was and he chose to go into those places in life, even to death alongside criminals and political rebels and all who opposed the power that was crushing and controlling the Hebrew people. He was willing to submit himself to the unknown without guarantees, trusting the promises of God, out of compassion for all of us. He walks headon into that forsaken, lonely place and pulls God in after him so that ever after when our lives take that dreaded turn, we are no longer alone. By choosing this way of compassion for us Jesus made sure that whatever we experience in this life we have a companion "who has been there before us, who has done battle with the powers of alienation that try to separate us from God and from one another", and in being there has linked us to the God who refuses to leave us desolate.

My younger sister, Rebecca, discovered this in her life. (Tell story)

[In her second year in college, Rebecca became ill and was ultimately diagnosed with systemic Lupus erythematosis (SLE), a chronic inflammatory disease of the connective tissue. She lived for 6 more years, trying to live as normal a life as possible. She tried to be active, but her energy quickly ran out and the treatment for SLE left her bones fragile.

She dealt with loneliness, and wrote this poem:

Loneliness wears on my soul
Like relentless drops of water.
My tears fall endlessly
As I cry out for mercy.
Dear God, will this piercing, penetrating pain
Ever cease?

Besides loneliness, she dealt with pain, medication, hospitalizations, and the loss of kidney function, which meant that she needed dialysis several times a week. Our mother learned to give her home dialysis, which continued for several years. She and our parents moved from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Shelton, and where she tried to continue her schooling in nearby Kearney, but was unsuccessful. After living there for a time, Rebecca decided she wanted to live on her own. She found a basement apartment near First United Methodist Church in Lincoln, the church where she had found much support and whose pastor had been with her through some of her darkest hours. She travelled to the hospital 3 times a week for dialysis, through rain, snow and ice. One day she collapsed and died in her apartment, from what was later discovered to be a ruptured aortic aneurysm.

She struggled with the illness, the pain, anger, despair, isolation, and knowledge that her life would be short. Through it all she kept up a dialogue with God, who heard her rage, her despair, her questioning, and finally her peace. Her favorate passage in the bible was Romans 8.]

Through the suffering, bitterness, and despair that she experienced, she found at the bottom of everything, a God who was with her in the suffering and who brought her through to times of joy and hope. Rebecca died on Good Friday, 21 years ago, at the age of 26. Her fundamental affirmation in the end was the discovery that nothing could separate her from the love of God in Christ Jesus. In her words:

God's love
Stands like a rock
That will never crumble.
Even in my darkest despair
It's there.

Our turn will come, if it hasn't already - our turn to experience the unknown, the places of desolation, of death, whether of body or spirit, without understanding what it is all about. We may not always go bravely or with courage, we may limp a little along the way, we may pray for deliverance. But as we go into that unknown of life, we meet Jesus who in his action to be there with us "dares us to believe that God is at the bottom of everything, especially the things we cannot understand, with strong arms waiting to catch us when all our nets break, with loving arms to cradle us when all our dying is done".

Not only does Jesus go there to be there for us, but he calls us to follow him on behalf of others. No longer can we call ourselves followers of Jesus and forsake those who are ill or old, who are dying, or being treated unjustly. No longer can we be silent about the violent ways of the world or abandon those whom the world forgets. We are called to pick up our cross, whatever that may be, and to trust God and act compassionately. Just as he is with us, so we are to be with others.

A Christian mystic who lived some 600 years ago, Julian of Norwich, was dying. And as she lay on her deathbed she had a vision of the crucified Jesus, standing at the foot of her bed and consoling her with the words "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well". That, in the end, is what the cross reveals to us and calls us to act upon: that come whatever, come affliction and hardship; persecution; hunger, nakedness, peril and sword; come cancer and fatal accidents; come betrayal and disappointment; come loneliness and abandonment; come anxiety and depression, come failure; come high winds and turbulent seas, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ, who has promised us that, at last, everything shall be well.

Thanks be to God!