Good Friday and the Cross

I participated in an ecumenical Good Friday service last week, which was very inspiring. The bulk of the service was done by lay members of various congregations. The person that led the Call to Worship said, (and I paraphrase) It seems it was only moments ago that we were spreading palms and singing Hosanna. Now we are at this moment, where things have taken such a different turn - betrayal, desertion, crucifixion . . .

And I thought, wow, so that's the thing. In other times when I've expected the next step to be the crowning culmination of success, and it hasn't come to pass, maybe it's actually following a different pattern. Maybe the cross is, as Mary Baker Eddy says, the central emblem of history. Maybe the challenge of the cross is to realize that it isn't the disposal of human events that establishes reality. It is the ever-present consciousness of the present divine order, the governing hand of Love, that establishes it. The people who put palms down for Jesus probably thought he was the saving king who would free them from the Roman yoke. Or at least that his power, as demonstrated by his healing works, would rise to the place of banishing all oppression. They didn't know that the greater work of the Messiah was to go into all the fractal paths of human thought and set everything right - to establish an order of peace that was universal because its underpinnings were internal - that it was the law of Love governing every cell of being, thus establishing pure individuals whose natural course is to engage lovingly with each other. Taking up the cross, then, would be the willingness to stand up for the goodness of being in every instance where it is challenged.

My part in the Good Friday service was to read Luke 23: 44-56, and then do a meditation on the phrase "Father, Into thy hands I commend my spirit." Here's what I shared:

“Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Jesus commends his spirit to God. He entrusts God with all that he is. He does so in the acknowledgment that his spirit is good – worthy of commendation. There is no doubt about this in his expression. He simultaneously establishes the worthiness of himself and the trustworthiness of God.

Jesus lets go. He lets go of all the machinations of the world, all the politics, all the sordid soul-selling that led to the conspiracy to put him to death. He lets go of the need to teach anymore, to explain anymore, to make the people understand. He commends his spirit to God – he trusts God to take care of everything that he is – his life, his purpose, his mission.

Jesus cries to his Father. His relationship with God is unbroken. All that he is is established by this relationship – the son who can do nothing of himself, but who always does what the Father tells him. He is always motivated by Spirit, the creative power that gives the impulse of life to the whole universe, and the impulse of love to everything moving in Spirit’s consciousness. This allows him, in this most dark time, to release any sense of responsibility for what will happen, and let Spirit work to establish its unbroken harmony.

Jesus is our way-shower. We are his disciples, and his friends, if we do what he commands, and he commands that we follow him. We follow him not so much by suffering as by allowing God, Life and Love, to lift us out. We can do this with each smaller despair, each human heartbreak, each place where things seem hopeless. We can commend our spirit to God.

We can let go of the sense that we have to explain things, set things right, figure them out, bring all guilty parties to justice. We can let go even of the grief and the pain and the disappointment with events of the world. We can commend our spirit to God, with the confidence that, even if we don’t know exactly who we are, God knows. God made us, God loves us, and God will teach us what we are. God will prepare the table before us. In the end, the circumstances of our lives don’t get to have the last word about what we are.