Together with some of you at Trinity, I spent Ash Wednesday—the first of forty days of Lenten self-denial that precede Easter—out on the streets of San Jose imposing ashes on the foreheads of people who had little need of them. The people sleeping rough in our urban parks and sidewalks know what it is to do without, and their faces are already well smeared with urban grime. When members of this Cathedral turn to me with longing to right the injustice of homelessness, what I have to offer you is mostly ancient words like those from Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me… why have you forsaken your people?
Those are words of deepest grief: hard to hear, and even harder to say. We don’t have a lot of practice with language like this, even in church. Ours is not a culture that grieves especially well: we like to put a positive face on things, and we prefer the happy ending. But sorrow that is not grieved does not disappear. Rather, it risks returning in the form of depression or reactive anger. Which may be why God enters into our human experience of loss and sorrow in the most intimate and personal way. On this day, Jesus’s sorrow meets our own.
Of sorrow, we have no shortage in our culture right now. Black poet James Baldwin, reflecting on the tragic losses and grief imposed by racism, said “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Yes, we actually do indeed have to deal with pain: for the suffering of our unhoused neighbors, for the victims of racism and gun violence, for all that our communities have lost during the pandemic, for the fragility of this earth, our island home.
Grief is both frightening and lonely, so part of the process of recovery is being in community, sharing in rituals of sorrow that eventually make way for health and resiliency. Which is always God’s promise to us. We heard it in the same mournful psalm that was just chanted: “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest. Yet—yet—you are the Holy One, enthroned upon the praises of Israel. Our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them.” All of which is true, but that’s getting ahead of the painful story we are in the midst of this evening. One way to understand Lent, and Good Friday especially, is as a time set aside to truly and honestly face our grief.
Our Biblical readings up to now, and tonight especially, follow Jesus towards a lonely and violent death. There’s no way around this, nor should there be. And Christians are not alone in telling stories and making rituals around suffering: virtually every major religious tradition has practices designed to help us remember that our ancestors suffered and grieved, so that we too can move through the disappointment and loss inherent in the human condition. Today I remember especially our Jewish sisters and brothers, tasting the salty tears of their enslaved ancestors in their Passover meals. Through religious rituals of sadness—for Christians these three holy days culminating in Easter—we can find ourselves more openhearted towards other experiences of pain and loss. And eventually, especially in a place like Trinity Cathedral, we become more connected with others, in ways that have potential to mend the hurts within us and around us.
And so I invite you to welcome this Good Friday as a time to cry in church, and to grieve in loving community. You might think of grief—for the death of Jesus, and everything else that invites our tears—as something like a friend who comes to heal us. So much has gone wrong: in our world, and on this day. At least for this moment, let’s not deny it. Instead, let’s spend time with our grief. She’s not the easiest friend to be around, but she warms up with tears and prayers and tears. When we listen to her voice, which we hear in ancient Psalms and stories and Lamentations, we might just find that grief binds us to humanity throughout history. And indeed, binds us to God’s very self, hanging lonely on a cross.
