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During the nineteenth century, all Oxford graduates were required to translate a portion of the Greek New Testament aloud. Oscar Wilde was assigned this passage from the passion story of Jesus. His translation was fluent and accurate. Satisfied with his skill, the examiners told him he could stop. But he ignored them and continued to translate. Several times more they tried to call a halt to his reading. Finally he looked up and said, “Oh, do let me go on! I want to see how it ends!”

We need to read this story from beginning to end, don’t we? In fact, even at the end, when Jesus is on the cross, when Jesus dies his horrible death, we do not want to quit. For the end is not the end, and Easter is just around the corner.

Yet today is Good Friday — or Death Day. Or the day of tragedy. Today we read the story that we do not want to read but we cannot avoid. Today we go to a horrible funeral for someone we know should not be dying or dead.

Horrible
There was another time when this came home to me. It was a funeral I did not expect with a family I did not know, the aftermath of a tragedy I could not comprehend. Two men drinking at a party, the younger man dating the older man’s daughter. A friendly scuffle? Or was it pent-up resentment that never before spied from the shadows? Was it a gun or a mock “shooting match” with scared friends and family? Then was another shot in the barn out back with a smoking weapon in the older man’s hand; the younger man dead on the ground.

Someone in our congregation took his friend from work to our worship services. For three months he and his common-law wife and children came on Sunday morning. He told me that he needed God. He told me that he found God at our church. He told me that his life was changing.

He sat steaming in my office. It was his brother that was murdered last night, and he wanted to kill the murderer! First things first, however. I was the only “priest” he knew. Could I officiate at the funeral?

The spattered blood of death became the splattered ink of chatter in our community, gossiped out of every media newsstand. The shooter was a white male, part of a prominent “old” family in our area, a black sheep lingering at the scandalous end of former glory. The dead man swaggered in on another, newer ethnic wave. Hidden behind his charismatic charm was a long record of drugs, theft, drunkenness, and sexual promiscuity.

Of course, the plot thickened. The man with the gun turned out to be brother-in-law to one of my best friends, a member of our congregation and someone I met with monthly in an accountability group. Their stories differed from that of the young brother who asked me to speak at the funeral. My friend and his family emptied their life savings into a fund to buy the best legal counsel for their “obviously innocent” relative. The angry brother, new Christian and newcomer to our worship services, did not know the unspoken protocol of “assigned seating” in our worship space, and had the audacity to plunk his family right in front of the woman whose brother had shot his brother. Now the newcomer worshiped with great urgency of heart, while the couple behind him and his common-law family fumed without worship.

The funeral was horribly difficult. I knew too much and not enough. Where was God in all of this?

When we gathered around the casket in the cemetery, I spoke a few words of committal, offered prayer, and then encouraged the brother to speak. He wept. He moved from shoulder to shoulder, shuddering grief on every neck. As the casket was lowered into the earth, he jumped down on it and blanketed it spread-eagled with his body. He wailed a litany of loss, sorrow, and vengeance that pummeled away any other sound. The world grew chill and still.

Most of the time I am an optimist. I like to think of my outlook as a holy confidence, a trust that God exists and that all things must work together for God’s good designs. But sometimes life is not fun, and the events of those horrible weeks linger with me as a shadow not easily erased. This is what the gospel, the horrible good news, reminds us of today.

Look At The Faces
This is the story that changed everything. It is the longest single episode of Jesus’ life that is told by all the gospel writers. While the preaching of the early Christians focused on the amazing event of Jesus’ resurrection, no historical event in Jesus’ earthly pilgrimage would be more accurately documented than the final night and morning before his crucifixion.

But what happened? What was the impact of these events? How did this one execution become so much more significant than all of the others that crowded the Roman judicial calendar in those months?

For Jerusalem’s religious leaders, this was a final breakthrough in the escalating problem of the northern rabbi who was attracting far too much attention. Here was a commoner, a village boy, causing the uneasy civic peace to be disturbed to a point that threatened rebellion and counter-crackdown. Jesus had to be put out of the way, so that normal life, compromised as it was in this Roman occupation, could go on.

For Jesus’ own disciples, this day was the beginning of a nightmare. They had traveled with their Master long and far, and they were not ready to fall into this painful pit, abruptly halting the movement that seemed destined for so much more. Suddenly purposeless, they cowered in hidden rooms, challenged at the very thought of appearing in public where their hero had been demonized.

Judas, however, sensed it differently. Had he pushed the envelope and forced Jesus’ hand into an armed confrontation with the governing authorities, hoping this would goad Jesus into action and allow them to get on with the business of stirring a popular uprising against the Romans? We can never be sure. But whatever satisfaction he found in bringing his devious plans to fruition, the aftermath turned sour. Rather than lighting a fuse of liberation, the arrest of Jesus had only sunk to a social tragedy. Jesus was dying, and that’s exactly where Judas wanted to be as well. After all, the camaraderie of the disciples would never be open to him again. He had been fingered as the traitor and his name would go down in history in infamy.

The Roman soldiers, however, saw nothing more in this crucifixion than another pay day. A shekel a head, or whatever the going rate was, and a little more money to gamble or drink with — the profits of war — the benefits of law enforcement.

Pilate wondered, during this day. He had been troubled when he was forced to get involved in this catastrophe in the making. The high priest should never have sent Jesus his way. There was no good option to this case; every way out was a dishonorable discharge. Even after he publicly washed his hands of the affair, showing his distaste for what was taking place, the matter would not die. Pilate went home to his wife, who then compounded his anxiety when she complained of nightmares about the man he just condemned. Pilate brooded in his chambers. He could not help but think that this haunting was only the beginning of a very deep darkness to come.

But what of the demons and angels? What of God in heaven? What did this event mean to all of them? In the big picture of things, this Friday slipped away almost too quietly, anticlimactically.

Overhyped?
In essence, nothing happened. The sun came back from hiding, children played in the streets, mothers fed babies, sabbath prayers were chanted, and all fell asleep that night. What had been billed as the showdown of the ages, the ultimate gunfight at OK Corral, the decisive contest at Milvian Bridge, the do-or-die resolution of Marathon, evaporated like a speck of dust flicked from the cuff of trousers ― and everyone went home to catch the six o’clock news.

But perhaps that is precisely the point. Life went on. Amazingly so. Life went on. Neither the death squads from hell nor the curse of God from heaven managed to quell life on planet earth. Because Jesus, heaven’s own emissary, laid himself like a copper wire across the poles of the seething battery where opposite forces were sparking for battle. And he drained all their energy.

We became the bystander; winners in a conflict focused on us, but resolved by others. Jesus died and the lights went back on in heaven. Jesus died and the lights went out in hell. Jesus died, and “It is finished!” declared the ultimate victory that kept the planets on track in the universe and love still coursing in the veins of women and men made in the image of their Creator. Jesus absorbed, in his death, both the vengefulness of evil and the wrath of heaven, and the outcome was pretty much that life as God intended it went on.

We still live with death and go to our funerals. But they have changed.

A friend called me one Saturday. He was a perennial student, far away from the town that shaped him, and mostly at odds with his family. There was good reason for his mother to chide, nag, and scold, for my friend had lost his faith, and his parents were worried. But the more they pushed the certainty of their beliefs on him, the more he chafed and backed away. He could no longer live in the simplicity of their dogma, even if it gave them shelter and safety.

He wandered in the wilderness of academia, hoping in each class to find a glorious utopia, a grand dream, or at least a tiny map that might point toward some secularized holy grail. Every term he called me to describe his latest faculty mentor, a true savior, finally, who was worthy of his devotion. But this Saturday something was different. There was wistfulness in my friend’s voice, and a trembling uncertainty in his words. What if there was no big picture, all-encompassing thesis, or unifying meaning? What if we were tripping with stumbling paces through the wilderness and there was no limit or signpost or way out? What if he was on a quest but there was nothing to find?

“I’m lonely,” he told me, and I was left to imagine his cosmic, spiritual aloneness, a void where both heaven and hell were silent and he was left in awful communion with only his inadequate self. There was no dream here, only an incessant heart hunger kept awake by an unrelenting nightmare.

But Jesus’ life among us, and his awful, horrible, scandalous, beautiful death somehow bound heaven to earth, God to humanity, eternity to time. We are not forgotten. For the one who thought us into being has become fully a traveler with us. He lived our life — he died our death — and we cannot be forgotten.

The Funerals Continue
So we go on with our own lives and deaths. My memories of my great-grandmother Bolt are very vague. I was a young lad when my parents took my older sister and me to see her at a retirement home in Willmar, Minnesota. I can remember the strange and mildly irritating smell of the place, and the dim incandescence of the corridor with its waxed linoleum. We tried unsuccessfully to turn down the volume of our clattering steps and shuffled into the room quietly, nervously afraid of arousing death before its time.

“Grandma Bolt” (as we were told to call her) reclined in an oversized lounger, barely aware of us. Her mouth hung open and she wore wrinkled skin several sizes too big over a shrinking frame. A musty afghan draped her carelessly. She couldn’t quite catch what my mom tried to tell her in a stage-whisper shout. We touched her hands and she seemed to fumble for ours with gnarled and cold fingers.

I can only recall this single visit to see her, and I know I didn’t like it. At the time she was an alien to me, even though I know now that a good deal of her DNA lives on in my own body. When Grandma died my parents didn’t take me to the funeral because I was supposedly too young to understand death. Now, some forty years later, I weep inside. I never knew the best of my great-grandma Bolt. I wasn’t there when she played as a child with boys like me. I never watched her giggle with friends or flirt with my great-grandfather. I never experienced the changing moods of her face, a barometer of her passions, fears, and faith. I never heard her sing in church, though I was told she loved the hymns. All I carry with me is the one scary visit of my childhood.

I am old enough now to attend funerals and I have gotten well past my early aversion to assisted care centers. What frightens me these days is the thought that there are probably fewer than 25 people alive today who remember my great-grandmother at all. When we couple dozen die, she will be truly forgotten ― a near-century of living, breathing, loving, toiling, memorizing, cooking, knitting, talking, aching, laughing, holding, washing, and befriending vapored and vanished like a six o’clock morning mist.

Nicholas Wolterstorffh reflected on the death of his son with these words: “There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing… There’s nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved… The world is emptier” (Lament for a Son). That’s true, as well, of my great-grandmother Bolt. True, too, of a host of good people whose gravestone legacies weather to indecipherable under time’s polishing.

It won’t be long before I join them, erased from life’s hard drive by the re-programmers of a new generation. Some years ago we were comparing ages in our family and one of my daughters remarked to another, “Dad has probably lived more than half his life already.” The words shivered through me and robbed me of the fun of the moment. It’s true ― I have probably lived half my life already. In the not-so-distant future I will be my great-grandmother, and only 25 minds will retain vague images of a wasted has-been.

But Jesus will remember me! Like the thief on the cross, like his mother at his feet, like the disciples cowering in the shadows, Jesus will remember us. Because of Good Friday, he will never leave us. He will never forsake us. He will never forget us.

We are the faces at his funeral. And when it comes time for our own funerals, his face will truly be the only one that matters ― for now ― for eternity.