Lonely

Tonight we stand at the foot of the cross; we see the nails, the crown of thorns, the cross itself. 

And oh, it’s hard to watch someone else’s pain.

On balance, that’s probably a good thing.  

Hating to watch people suffer drives discovery and care in the medical field.  It means that we offer help to one another. It motivates people to work on solving chronic hunger, overthrow dictators, reform laws or systems of injustice.

But when we can’t help, it’s a handicap.

It keeps parents awake at night, wears spouses thin, even grates on friendship, when someone we love is suffering, and we just have to watch.

So sometimes we flee the helplessness,pull back from a relationship,wait out the pain from a distance, wondering what happened to the one we used to know and love.

That’s what happened to Jesus, when the disciples fled in fear, and even those condemned to die with him made fun of him.

Pain can be so lonely. 

Because pain can’t actually be shared, even when you’re surrounded by friends and companions.

Tonight it’s not just the pain of Jesus.

There’s Judas’ despair.

The fear that separates Peter from himself.

The grief of the women huddled at the foot of the cross. Even, in some ways, Pilate’s frustration and the mockery of the soldiers – since both of those are ways we defend ourselves from pain we don’t want to face.

It’s the loneliest story in the Gospel.

And that, after all, is why we’re here.

We’re not here to change the story.

We can’t be good enough, or sorry enough, to keep Jesus from dying.

We’re not here to help, to comfort, or to make ourselves feel better.

We’re here because when Jesus is alone, isolated on the cross, treated as a joke – not a person – by the powerful and the oppressed alike,

when Jesus is so alone, we know that we are not.

Today is a promise that even in the loneliest of our pain, God is with us.

When other people give up on your pain, or when you turn aside, helpless in the face of someone else’s pain, God has been there; God is still there, in pain that no one else can face. 

The loneliness of the cross is a promise that in fact God does not turn away when our pain is beyond help, or even comfort.  God has seen this through to the end, and beyond the end, so that nothing can separate God from us.

The story we hear tonight is hard.

Because pain is hard.

And you and I live with it – if not today, then some time in our lives.

So we come to the foot of the cross tonight to meet the truth that God cannot, and will not, turn away from our pain.

It’s a story of hope,

a story of truth.

The truth that God will never give up on us,

the hope that we can face the pain, and be drawn closer to God, and to one another.

Tonight, at the foot of the cross,

we’re not simply seeing someone else’s pain,

but looking through it,

to the hope and truth that spell “love.”

Good Friday, 2013.  Preached at the community worship service combining First Methodist Church, First Church UCC, and Calvary Episcopal Church in Lombard, Illinois