Good Friday

Was there ever a day that you cursed the sunset?

Friday might have been that kind of day for Peter. It had been a long week. First there was all the preparing for the Passover celebration. Then there was that great crowd that showed up when Jesus and the disciples entered the city, and then there was that big mess the next day at the temple. Jesus with a whip, causing all kinds of ruckus. Then came the big feast, the great Passover celebration. A long, slow, extravagant dinner party, reclining at the table with your best friends in the world, tender roast lamb and unleavened bread with honey and rich wine.

Then, after dinner, Jesus wants to go out for a walk, all the way over there, to this garden, and pray. Seems like he’s always praying. Sometimes by himself, but this time he wants the disciples to come along. And, of course, they go. He’s the Rabbi, after all. They go where he goes, if he asks. He’s the one they have given their whole lives up for, bet the farm on, laid on him all their hopes and secret dreams. For three years now, they’ve been wandering around the countryside, stopping to preach in every little village they could find. Peter, every so often, jokes that he’s forgetting how to fish, not that he really wants to go back to it.

The garden is quiet at night. Jesus takes Peter, and James, and John, and says to them, stay here and watch while I go right over there and pray. Okay, Rabbi. Peter sits down, puts his back against a tree trunk, and waits. The night air is cool, and the tree branches rustle soothingly in the gentle breeze. The stars are clear and bright. The night birds and the little bugs make soft, quiet, contented sounds. The breeze wafts over him the delicious scent of blooming flowers. And Peter leans his head back against the smooth wood of the olive tree and closes his eyes. Only a moment later, it seems, Jesus is shaking him awake. Peter! Wake up! Can’t you watch with me a little while? Okay, Rabbi, I’m up, I’m up. But his eyelids are heavy after the great feast, and soon once again Peter dreams.

The next time he awakes, it is to the flickering light of torches reflected on swords and clubs. And for the last twenty-four hours, Peter has been wide awake, with some tiny part of him thinking that he is, in fact, still trapped in a horrible nightmare.

The disciples have deserted Jesus and fled. Peter denied him three times, and the mocking call of the rooster still echoes in his ears. He was mocked, beaten, executed.

He is dead.

Friday night, Peter has neither eaten nor slept since the feast. And now, as the sky darkens from royal purple to empty black, as all light and all goodness slowly leach out of the world, as all the colors of all the objects around him turn to a lifeless gray, the exhausted disciple slumps to the ground, leans his back against the great stone that covers the mouth of the tomb, and stares with empty eyes into the void.

Peter must endure the long, slow, still hours of this night, not daring to sleep for fear of the horrors that crowd in every time he closes his eyes. He can’t even think about tomorrow, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, or the next day, or the rest of his life.




In today’s gospel story appears for the first and only time a man named Joseph of Arimathea. A disciple of Jesus, so we’re told. The gospel writers tell us that he was wealthy, and a member of the Sanhedrin. And he was probably an older man; with his wealth, he bought a garden, and in the garden he had carved a new tomb. Joseph knew his scriptures. He was seeking the kingdom of God. And he also understood that people die. That’s just the way it is. So he was making preparations.

When Jesus died, this disciple did a stunningly foolish and courageous thing: he went to the governor and asked for the body of a man executed that same day for being dangerous to the state. Working in haste to finish the work before sundown, Joseph carried the broken body of Jesus to his own tomb. In the place the disciple had prepared for his own burial, instead there lies the Son of God.

A huge stone seals the mouth of the tomb. Jesus lies in silent blackness, the air of the tomb filled with myrrh’s bitter perfume almost, but not completely, covering the coppery smell of spilled blood.

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When I was a little boy, I loved to run and play outside. My grandfather, who was in his youth a semi-professional ballplayer, taught me to love the game of baseball. Along the way, he introduced me to the writings and teachings of a man who would become one of my boyhood heroes: Theodore Samuel Williams.

Ted Williams! Fighter pilot, United States Marine, decorated war hero, sport-fisherman par excellance, and almost unarguably the greater hitter in the history of the game. "The gospel according to Ted Williams" is called The Science of Hitting. My copy is an ancient brown hardback. The cover and spine are almost worn out, the pages are dog-eared and stained, with the dust of thirty years of sandlot ballparks deep down in the creases between the pages.

In case you’re getting worried, that’s about as far as I ever want to go comparing Ted Williams to Jesus of Nazareth. Ted was an atheist, for one thing. And a foul-mouthed, misogynistic, arrogant old man. His temper and foul mouth were legendary, he spit at the fans, and threw and smashed things in his rage.

Before he died, he and his son and one of his daughters made a pact to undergo a bizarre post-mortem procedure. Supposedly written from a hospital bed, where the old man was confined, close to death, the handwritten note was scrawled on an oil-stained piece of yellow legal sized paper. The key line read: "To be able to be together in The Future, even if it is only a chance."

Almost immediately after Ted Williams took his last breath, his son John Henry Williams went to the doctors and asked for the body. There was no announcement of death, no funeral arrangements, no memorial. The body was immediately packed in ice, loaded onto a private jet, and flown, faster than the speed of sound, to a cryonics laboratory in the Arizona Desert.

His body was drained of fluids and filled with an anti-freeze solution. His head was shaved, and then crudely separated from his body. Holes were drilled in the skull. In the process it was cracked nine times. Both head and body were coated with a glycerin solution and lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen.

The greatest hitter who ever lived, the fighter pilot John Wayne emulated, the man about whom Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike once wrote "immortality is non-transferable... gods do not answer letters," floats, upside-down, in the silent blackness of a nine-foot-long steel tube maintained at a temperature of 350 degrees below zero.

Only a few short years later, his son John Henry died of leukemia. He was subjected to the same procedure. And now, father and son lie together, in the same shabby warehouse on a side street somewhere in Arizona, in a bitter, unnatural cold, preserved forever.

Just in case.

I dearly wish I was making this up.



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We are a resurrection people. Tomorrow at the great vigil we will proclaim again the greatest news ever recorded in the history of the world.

But today we remember: he is dead.

Jesus, the Son of God, the Son of Mary, lies in the darkness on the other side of a great stone. He’s not asleep. Not faking it. Not preserved in hope of some future advance of medical science.

He’s dead.

Friends, the wondrous news of Easter is not that death is cheated. It’s that death is conquered. But that’s tomorrow. For tonight, keep watch through the long slow hours. And wait.