Rage Against the Dying of The Light: Good Friday 2016 (Lk 22.39-23.56)

8/19/2019 Rage Against the Dying of The Light: Good Friday 2016 (Lk 22.39-23.56)

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P

AUL

B

URKHART

S

ERMON

:

L

UKE

22.39 23.56

GOOD FRIDAY: RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

KEY TEXTS: Luke 22.39-45; 23.44-56

2239 He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciplesfollowed him. 40 When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into

the time of trial.” 41 Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and

prayed, 42 “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be

done.” [[43 Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. 44 In his anguish

he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on theground.]] 45 When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping

because of grief, 46 and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may

not come into the time of trial.”

2344 It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in theafternoon, 45 while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46 Then

Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having

said this, he breathed his last. 47 When the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God

and said, “Certainly this man was innocent.” 48 And when all the crowds who had gathered

there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts.49 But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a

distance, watching these things.

56 On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

Prayer for Illumination:

LordGod,forResurrectiontohappen,theremustbeDeath.Welivebetweenthosetworealities,andwe

dosoimperfectly.Helpstrengthenusandbuildinusaspiritualscaffoldingandinfrastructureasyour

people,sowemightbeartheweightofthisworld,anddoitbetterthanwehavebefore— forusandfor

theworldaroundus.AMEN.


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SERMON

Intro: Passion Geography

Preaching on this passage this year is a unique privilege for me. As many of you know, in

January I took a trip to Israel and walked these very steps that Jesus takes in our story. And the

most powerful place for me on that whole trip was the Mount of Olives, where I text opens up,

where Jesus is praying with his disciples.

The Mount itself is taller than the city of Jerusalem, so from anywhere on the Mount, you stand

overlooking the entire city of Jerusalem with the Temple Mount, where the Jewish Temple once

stood, standing right in the middle of your vantage point.

Judaism believes that the Messiah—the one who comes to make all things right in the worldand do away with evil—will come to earth at the Mount of Olives, down the Kidron Valley and

back up onto the Temple Mount, where he will make the Temple his throne room from which

he will rule and reign on the world in justice and goodness. Further, they believe when he

comes he will raise from the dead all of his people to rule and reign with him.

This belief led to the start of the largest and oldest Jewish cemetery in the world, built onto the

side of the Mount of Olives. This cemetery would have been there even during Jesus’ time, and

it’s hard to miss. While on the Mount, standing between you and Jerusalem, the place where

the Messiah will make all things right, there stretched before you a massive cemetery of

tombstones numbering in the 100s of thousands.

Additionally, all of these graves are buried with the feet of their inhabitants facing toward the

temple, the idea being that when the Messiah comes, not only will they be the first raised form

the dead, but that they’ll have a running head start to the Temple.

So we should note the same think Jesus likely did as he was praying. As he looks up and over

to the Temple, this symbol of life, forgiveness, wholeness, and God’s presence, he knows the

weighty truth we will press into tonight: the only way to Easter, Resurrection Life, and God’s

good rule and reign in our hearts the world, is to descend and cross over into the lowest of

valleys and through death itself.

A Radical Release

This truth is seen most clearly in the bookends of our passage, those powerful prayers of Jesus

to his Father: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be

done” and “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit”. In these brief prayers, there is a


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universe of meaning and weight. They occupy a liminal space between doubt and faith,

questions and answers, knowledge and mystery, life and death.

Jesus cries out to his Father and throws himself entirely on the willingness of his Father to do

something that God ultimately does not do! God is not willing to let this cup pass. And yet, Jesus

casts himself and his soul entirely on the unknown will of his Father. Jesus genuinely does notseem to know what his Father’s answer may be here.

Similarly, when Jesus commits his Spirit into his Father’s hands, it is a complete abandoning of

his entire self for God to do whatever he wants! His Father had already said no to Jesus’ prior

prayer (He would not let this cup pass), and yet Jesus is still willing to leave his present and his

future—in both this life and the next—entirely in the hands of his Father.

This shows us a radical faith, not in observable outcomes are even believed doctrines, but

purely in who this God is—even when we are not 100% confident exactly what it might look

like. The modernist poet Wallace Stevens’ expresses this tension well in one of his most

beautiful poems, "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard":

"After the final no there comes a yes,

And on that yes the future world depends."

--Wallace Stevens, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard ”

Stevens wasn’t a Christian as far as we know, but he expresses this sense that in a huge, cosmic,

existential way, we feel in our bones a definitive “No” stamped on all our endeavors. They will

die. We will die. Evil will prosper and righteousness will lose. The only kind of meaning andfullness we can know is from what we can extract out of our lives right now in the present.

There is, as Stevens calls it, a “final no” to all things.

And yet, he admits to a quieter voice echoing out from the nothingness. After the final No that

rages inside of us, there is a Yes. A quiet Yes. A Yes that is easily drowned out and distracted

from, and yet a Yes nonetheless. And it is on this Yes that all the future depends.

Jesus shows us in these Good Friday pleadings that the No is true and definite. Feeling it is not a

failure of faith. And yet there is a Yes towards which our intuitions hearken and our trust can be

offered. But it is a kind of trust that has to be an act of abandon shouted into the seeming

nothingness, hoping, praying, that the echo that answers us in response is that “Yes”.

Easter Tension

It is my belief that we move too quickly to Easter in this time of year. In a cosmic sense, this

universe—and our lives—are currently stuck between the Cosmic Good Friday and Cosmic


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Easter. We must learn what it means to live in this tension—to fully inhabit it and occupy it. The

Christian life is one of process, growth, and abandon to the God that is bigger than our

certainty.

Our world lives in Good Friday. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously said that “God is

dead”. But have you ever read the full quote from when he first said this? He said:

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we

comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?"

--Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science”

This statement by Nietzsche wasn’t some statement of arrogant atheistic certitude. It was a

lament; a description of the reality in which so many of us live. Looking over the history of our

world, he points out to us that humanity has destroyed the pillars that held up all meaning for

our existence. All the transcendence on which our future hope was based has been shattered as

humans have based more and more of their sense of meaning and purpose on this world and

this life here and now.

In a sense, Nietzsche is saying that this world exists in a kind of “Saturday” after Good Friday; a

kind of world where God "feels" dead, where the things of God feel more like the hauntings of a

ghost from one long dead, where the cries of the dying God on the Cross echo and reverberate

against the walls of our lives.

And again, for those of us that have felt this sense of Divine Death (and I’d argue it’s all of us),

this isn’t an expression of pride, arrogance, sin, Christian immaturity, or some lack of faith. It ispressing all the more deeply into the weighty, middle space in which this world lives and our

souls exist. Feeling this way is simply being human.

Notice that in our text, Jesus does not move immediately to Resurrection. In none of his prayers

does he mention it. He doesn’t stare death and evil in the face and blithely say, “Oh, it’s fine.

God’s good and I’ll be raised again in a few days.” He fully inhabits the unknowing, the fear, and

temptation to cling to what he knows here and now and forget the rest. To be the best

“pleasing” religious person possible without the deep existential abandon of giving oneself over

entirely to God.

He enfolds this middle space of doubt, questioning, unknowing, and Divine Abandonment into

his own experience. And so when we experience those things, we are not far from God, but

rather are closer to the very life of God.

And so we see that Easter and Resurrection life can only come if we pass through death. And

not just physical death, but death to our certainty, death to our desires, death to our comfort,

death to our very will in this world.


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The Good Friday Proclamation: God Has Died

And so, on this night, we proclaim: God has died. God has died. There is the final No. Ig is loud.

It is real. May we learn to commend our souls to a God even though we don’t know for surewhat he will do. We place our souls in the hands of a God that might very well let us go, drop

us, or crush us. At this point in the story—this Good Friday point—we simply do not know. We

read the words of these Scriptures, press into Christian life best we can—and still we will never

know for sure. All we can do is cast ourselves into the existential unknown of the Final No and

hope, that the response is Yes.

Let us not move too quickly to the overwhelming joy and sweetness of Easter without passing

through the darkness and tension of this night. Let us feel it rage in our hearts and souls. Let us

look out on a world that—most days, let’s admit it—does not seem to look like it is being ruled

by a Good God, but rather lives in the darkness of Good Friday. Let us learn to do what anotherpoet, Dylan Thomas, tells us to do:

"Do not go gentle into that good night …

[but] rage, rage against the dying of the light."

--Dylan Thomas, “ Do not go softly into that Good Night ”

So Liberti Church, may you dwell deeply in the darkness of Good Friday, and learn to do so

well. And may we, together, rage, rage against the dying of the light. In the name of the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.

To close the message, I will pray this prayer by St. Teresa of Avila, which is also printed in your

worship folder:

"If it is your will, my God, let us die with you.... Living without you is nothing

but dying over and over again. Living without you is nothing but living in

dread of the possibility of losing you forever."

-- St Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle


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Sermon B-Side

”

: What didn

t make the final cut

In conclusion, how do we inhabit this tension? How do we live between Good Friday and Easter

as we await when—and if —Resurrection may come? I offer two ways we can do this. First, let

us take our cue from the people of God who have come before us and now lay in that Jewish

cemetery built into the side of the Mount of Olives. As we enter into death, let us dwell in on

this Mount, praying with Jesus, with our feet pointed toward God’s Temple and God’s presence.

Let us—together—plant our feet firmly in the direction of God’s presence and God’s family. We

live in this tension together , not alone, and in faith—trust—that of God comes and brings life

and meaning to both our future and our present, he will bring us along with him.

And secondly, let us follow the example of Jesus’ disciples. Tomorrow is what the Church has

historically called “Holy Saturday”, and it’s perhaps the most mysterious day in all of

Christianity. What the heck is going on here with Jesus, his work, and this world in that in-

between day? We simply don’t know. But what were the disciples doing on Holy Saturday?

Look at the last line of our text. In all four Gospels, this is the thing every said about what wasgoing on that day. The only hint we are given about what life looks like between God’s Death

and God’s Life: “On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.”

Tomorrow, and in our life to come, as we live in a holy Saturday kind of world, we find places of

quietness and rest. We find a place for our doubts and questions to give voice. We find rhythms

to our life that keep us in the God’s rhythm even as we abandon ourselves to his will.

Documents

Rage Against the Dying of The Light: Good Friday 2016 (Lk 22.39-23.56)