One of the things we remember today is that God went silent for a time.....God enters the silence of the grave..... By taking on the silence of the grave, God is reminding us of the humanity Jesus took on....took on for us. Silence is such a hard commodity to come by in our world.....When we find silence, we can find it to be such a hard burden to live into....Within silence we can face our own demons and troubles and worries and insecurities....So we try and fill that silence with words, music, something to distract us. We should not ignore this gift of silence because one of the things we can find there, in that silence, is God.

So we remember that the Incarnation, God taking human form and living and being with us, ended today with Jesus dying on the Cross and God going silent for a time. Barbara Brown Taylor talks about the finality of the silence of death when she reflects on sitting at a dying loved one's bedside, she says: Between human beings there may be no silence as loud as the silence of death. To sit beside a bed, day after day, listening to the ragged intake of breath - to hear the lungs fill, to hear the unproductive cough until finally there is so little need for air that there is only the slightest flutter four or five times a minute - no clock measures time like this, nor is it possible to describe the moment when there is a tick but no tock. The breath goes out and it does not come in again. No one knows it was the last until it is gone, and the silence that follows it is like no other sound in the world...... there is such finality in that silence for us.

That finality, of Jesus' human life ending, is what makes today a heavy day. He won't laugh with his friends, with his disciples, with his apostles in the same way, ever again. And this is a heavy day too because this day reminds us of our own mortality..... That we only have so many ticks and tocks left before the silence that is death overtakes us and our human existence comes to an end. To really live into this Good Friday moment and understand what God has done should actually lift some of that heaviness from our souls. For what we all will personally experience, and perhaps have experienced vicariously with the death of loved ones and friends, has been personally experienced by God. God knows this silence, from personal experience: not only as our creator but because Jesus died and was buried....And into that silence God entered.....and did something new.

So today is a heavy day because the human life of Jesus came to an end. God's sojourn as a human being among us comes to an end. In order to better comprehend what we celebrate in a few days' time, we need to appreciate and acknowledge this heavy moment....live in the silence....live in this moment of a human being dying..... In that dying, we learn something important....that although Jesus' human life is over, we know death is not the end. The holy of holies died this Good Friday and we remember that this human Jesus is gone to the silence of death....... And nothing, absolutely nothing has been the same since. That makes this, although heavy, a very Good Friday.