Under the Weight of these Times

Good Friday sermon by Jamie Howison

These are not easy times, these days in which we are living. Some years on Good Friday our minds can wander all too easily to an Easter meal that awaits over the coming days, trying to remember what we still need to buy at the grocery store tomorrow, and who we might have forgotten to invite to dinner. We enter the church for the liturgy—this year through the snow, but some years on lovely spring days—and vow ourselves into a space in which to contemplate yet again the meaning of this story we will tell. We bow our heads, and then cross our fingers behind our backs as we imagine what it would be like to tell this story with absolutely no knowledge of the story we will proclaim on Sunday.

Of course, we do know that Sunday story, and ringing in the back of our imaginations can be that assertion drawn from the Black Church tradition and made famous by Dr. Tony Campolo in a landmark sermon he often preaches: “It’s only Friday… but Sunday’s Comin’!”

“It’s Friday… Jesus was nailed dead on a cross.
But it’s only Friday; Sunday’s coming!

It’s Friday… Mary’s crying her eyes out ‘cause her Jesus is dead.
But it’s only Friday; Sunday’s coming!

It’s Friday… The disciples are running around like sheep without a shepherd.
But it’s only Friday; Sunday’s coming!

It’s Friday… Pilate’s strutting around washing his hands ‘cause he thinks he’s got all the power and victory.
But it’s only Friday; Sunday’s coming!

It’s Friday… People are saying “as things have been so they shall be – you can’t change anything in this world.”
But it’s only Friday; Sunday’s coming!

It’s Friday… Satan’s doing a jig saying, “I control the whole world.”
But it’s only Friday; Sunday’s coming!

Yes, it’s Friday—Good Friday—but this is the first Good Friday since 2019 that we’ve had a congregation present here in the church… and frankly for the past few days we weren’t sure we could get here, thanks to the blizzard. And yes, Sunday is coming, and Sunday will find a congregation back here again for the first gathered Easter celebration since 2019. It is hard for me to not take some real delight in having us back here, but it is also hard for me to not ponder the strange character of these days in which we live.

I head into the grocery store and think nothing of putting on a mask and following arrows that direct me up and down the aisles. This is just the new normal, right? And for most of us most of the time, we just do that. Sure, some have tossed aside their masks, and surely more will do that as the weeks tick forward, but here in Winnipeg it seems that most of us see this as a respectful thing to do. Not a great hardship, is it? And then I stop, and I think about those weeks near the beginning of the pandemic when the shelves were stripped bare of toilet paper. I watched how a kind of cheese that I’ve been buying for years at the price of $7.29 suddenly jumped a couple of weeks ago to $10, and how those Scottish oatcakes I like to buy seem to have disappeared altogether. Well, I can cope, keep an eye out for sales, and just forge ahead. I can do that, many of you can do that, but for some this is almost impossible to navigate with a fixed income.

And I’d assumed that we were all pretty much on board with masks, and mostly thought that the vaccination was a very good thing indeed. Or at least I did until I began to hear about that restaurant that didn’t ask for masking and was quietly putting out the word that it was welcoming of those who thought the pandemic was all an inflated government ploy to put us all in a nice, neat line.

And then the trucks began to arrive just across the road from here, in front of the Legislative Building, with horns blaring. The protesters poured out on to Broadway, waving their signs, giving the thumbs-up, smiling and calling for me to support their anti-masking cause by honking my own car horn.

That seemed a frightful amount of energy to pour into protesting something so basic as a mask, but of course there was also a vaccine protest at work amongst that same group. Unless they had proof of vaccination, cross-border truck drivers were pretty much stopped from doing their work; that was at least ostensibly the start of the protest, both here and in Ottawa and in other places across the country. Yet quickly it became apparent that extremist groups had piggy-backed their causes on top of the masking and vaccine issues, and things began to get even messier.

In the midst of all of this division and confusion, Ukraine found itself besieged by the Russian army, and we watched the news reports and listened to the voices on the radio describing the flight of millions of Ukrainians—millions—and the devastation wrought by the bombs dropped on those Ukrainian cities. It is almost unimaginable what is happening there, and almost unimaginable to begin to think how those people might dig their way out from under the rubble—literal and metaphorical rubble—when this somehow ends. And then a few weeks ago as I was driving on Portage Avenue listening to a news report about Ukraine, I saw a big group of anti-vax, anti-mask protesters outside of the CBC building, waving signs accusing the CBC of deceiving us and calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister who was robbing us of our freedoms. The contrast between what I was hearing on the news about Ukraine and what I was seeing on the street was unsettling, and for a moment I wanted to pull my car off the road and go and confront them. “You want to know about lost freedom? Lost lives? Lost everything?”

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, surrounded by his disciples and followers, the hopes of those who watched were very high. They cut down branches, waving them and laying them across the road as he went, shouting their loud “hosannas”, which means literally “save us.” In his gospel account, John tells us that they were palm branches, which links this procession back to one described in the deuterocanonical book of 1st Maccabees, in which Jewish rebels managed to capture Jerusalem back from the Seleucids in the 160s BCE. As they marched into the city, that book tells us, they “entered it with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs, because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel.” (1 Macc. 13:51) Is this now happening again, in Jesus? A revolution and reclamation? That’s what those waving palm branches seemed to say…

Yet he was riding a donkey, not a war horse. For all that people had hoped he was the revolutionary they’d been waiting for, instead of rallying the troops he had gone to the temple and chased out the merchants and moneychangers, engaged in debate with the Pharisees, Sadducees, and other members of the Jewish elite in the public square, talked to his followers not about military victory, but instead about his impending death, and watched as what had seemed like a popular movement dissolved back into the desperate state of normal. Shortages of food, an unstable market, soldiers marching in the streets, insecurity all around. No matter how normally people tried to live, it was always under the weight of the Empire. And it didn’t appear that Jesus had any plan at all about ousting that Empire, in the way that their Maccabean forebears had ousted the Seleucids.

When he was arrested, the temple authorities saw it as a necessity. Rid the city of this man, they reasoned, for he is unsettling the delicate balance we have with Rome. That popular movement that had heralded him as a revolutionary quickly dissolved, with many going back to the drudgery of normal, and others actively joining their voices in calling for his execution. Scared and overwhelmed, his own disciples hid, fearing for their own lives.

And he was crucified, which was the horrific torture devised by the Romans to deal with anyone deemed a political upstart. His words as carried to us by Luke: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing,” and then to the thief who was crucified beside him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” And then finally as he breathed his dying breaths, “with a loud voice he said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’”

As it all unfolded, no one really knew what he meant or where it would lead. Perhaps nowhere at all? Certainly, for the women followers who stood by and watched and for the disciples who remained in hiding, the dream was over.

Or maybe their dream was over, the one that was framed in terms of victory over Rome and the reclamation of Jerusalem from its occupiers. The dream in which they wanted to sit at his right and left sides as rulers of the new order, imagining victory in the very terms that the Empire had set them.

The path Jesus set was longer, harder, more winding, and with a good many stones in the road. It also happens to be the path—the Way—that is true. In an ancient land at least as divided as the world today—with factions and rumours and extremists and collaborators, just as we see in our world—he set a path that can be followed, and followed with confidence.

Last week I read the story of the Rev. Ioann Burdin, the rector of Resurrection of Christ Orthodox Church in the Russian village of Nikolskoye. Fr. Burdin has dared to speak out loudly and publicly against his own country’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I don’t consider it possible to remain silent on this situation,” he said. “It wasn’t about politics. It was about the Bible. … If I remain silent, I’m not a priest.”

It is about the Bible, this priest had said, later adding, “Your job is not to change, but to testify.”

Testifying in such a context is, of course, dangerous. It is probably just as dangerous as was Jesus’ challenging of the powers that be in the public square or his chasing the merchants from the temple.

“Your job is not to change, but to testify.” That’s an extraordinary statement. Even more extraordinary, though, is what he said when he was again later asked about his role—his voice and challenge—Fr. Burdin simply invoked Psalm 27:

“The Lord is my enlightenment and my Savior — whom shall I fear? The Lord is the defender of my life — whom shall I fear?”

And so we sit under the weight of these times, and for today we submit to the weight of this gospel story. For the rest of today and tomorrow we wait, until we can tell the other side of this story; the side that has inspired Fr. Burdin to speak out in Russia, and that will hopefully inspire us all to speak and live and act where we are too. Surely burdened by the brokenness of the world, yet never defeated or shattered by it.