Good Friday - March 29

Always We Begin Again

Good Friday has a powerful, overwhelming feeling of finality. Despair.

I think of the old movies where at the end darkness closes in from the sides until only the tiniest point of light is left and then it is gone. Nothing.

Or it’s like a catastrophic slow-motion wreck that we are a part of and are powerless to stop.

Some of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion say that the world went dark when he was crucified. I imagine that experience, not as the shadowy twilight of a solar eclipse as we now know it, but as total darkness. An “I cannot see where I am or where I’m going” darkness. And I am completely powerless to create light.

The end. There is nothing more and there is nothing you or I can do. It’s over.

And yet, as I live into Good Friday this year, for some reason I feel like I have been given some words from St. Benedict. They come from his instructions for monastic life, written in the early 6th century, to guide and order the common life of monks.

Always we begin again, St. Benedict wrote.

Good Friday is about an end as real and as total as beyond our repair as death. And yet, always we begin again.

Maybe that is one of the great gifts of the discipline of the monastic life. To enable us to internalize the assurance that always we begin again. By God’s grace, each day we begin again. Each Advent. Each time the entire psalter is read in worship and then begins again. Each time a monk strays or fails and, by God’s grace, is reconciled and returned to the common life.

The pervasive and holy routine of the monastic life insures that always we begin again.

This isn’t about human perseverance or steadfastness or optimism or even hope. This isn’t about human anything. This is about an end that it is beyond any human ability or power to change or avert. An end that is complete and that we are powerless to overcome.

And yet, always we begin again.

I think we come to this liturgy, do this common work of worship together… immerse ourselves in this day, not just to experience its finality. But also to reassure ourselves that even from this final end, beyond all hope or expectation we are given a place to begin again.

There is nothing partial or qualified about Jesus’ death. He is dead. We killed him.

But we have come to know that there is a beginning even in Jesus’ crucifixion. Therefore we cling to the assurance that there is a beginning in the midst of whatever the darkest place in our lives or deaths may be.

By God’s grace and only by God’s grace, we begin again. Out of guilt, out of despair, out of sin, out of loss, out of failure, out of death, by God’s grace, we begin again.

This liturgy brings us to the cross. But this liturgy does not end at the cross. At the end of our common worship today, there is no dismissal. This liturgy does not reach its completion or fulfillment until the end of the Vigil, after the first Eucharist of Easter.

These words aren’t reported in John’s account of the passion which we heard today, but they are in Luke which we heard on Palm Sunday. From the cross, looking down on those around him… From the cross that we now face, Jesus says, “Father forgive them.” Forgive them.

Always we begin again.