My childhood questions continue to haunt me on Good Friday. Memories of taunting the priest of my adolescence with "What is so good about Good Friday?" remain on some level legitimate. Now as an adult, and as Priest, the numbers of people who do show up for the Good Friday liturgy catches me off guard. It is a time of worship punctuated by graphic accounts of betrayal, pain and alienation, and by the chanting of a psalm of lament that reminds each of us that we have, at one time or another, probably been despised. Yet, too, this time together on Good Friday comes at the end of a Holy Week during which we, like Jesus' disciples, have not been able to stay awake to pray with him - a Holy Week that has made us aware of our own betrayals of God and one another - a Holy Week that has brought us face to face with our awkwardness and resistance to being loved ... and to be loving ... as Jesus on Maundy Thursday commanded his followers to do, by washing one another's feet, and allowing another close enough to wash ours. And then the hymn we are about to sing brings us right into the middle of the Good Friday drama with the words that indict us all: Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

What draws us here? The Passion narrative that we just heard from John's gospel is jarring. Each of us are somewhere in the crowd, play a leading or supporting role, having a speaking or a silent part in the drama. There are characters with names, and others left un-named. It is a story about people, like you and me. Little is said about the weather or the land or what anyone was wearing, until the very end of the story, when Jesus is left hanging on the cross, naked, on a hill, dripping with his own blood and the mocking - stinging vinegar, sweat and pain, abandonment and loneliness, forgiveness and love spilling forth.

The sky is thick with darkness and remorse, around those gathered at the foot of the cross. They know it's too late to go back and undo mistakes, too late to retrieve words or stones pitched like heat seeking missiles. And we, like they, are all too aware of things done and left undone. We, like they, are left immobilized and alone, unable to do anything but cower and wait.

During this Holy Week, each of us has taken part in this story as best we can, picking out one or two opportunities that connect our frailty to parts of the story we can bear...for now. Maybe you came to an evening Taize Eucharist or two, watched the foot washing this year, wondering about washing someone else's feet next year-which would mean you would have yours washed as well-knowing that vulnerability can invite vulnerability and/or manipulation. We take in as much as we can, pieces of the drama, little bits at a time. We risk as much longing and nakedness-as much love and death and resurrection, as our faith and frailty allows. We follow Christ as far as we can. Because to get to Easter, a dying and rebirth of who we were created to be, we must follow Christ as we are able through the unfulfilled joy of Palm Sunday, through the stark reality of the last supper Jesus shared with his friends, through the dark reality of a cold stone tomb. Each of us has a place in the drama of Good Friday, because it is our story, the story of our journey in faith and doubt, faithfulness and betrayal, with God and one another.

To participate in Holy Week, this most sacred week of our lives lived together in community, is to walk in the way of discomfort and awkwardness and suffering, to confront ourselves with the naked answer of the jarring question, who are we willing to suffer for and what are we willing to give our lives to? To walk the Jesus-way is to believe that joy is greater than despair, that reconciliation is possible through humility, and that there is something greater than any harm, something surpassing all pain, something that will always have the last word, because it is the word made flesh. That word is love. That word is God.

Amen +