April 14, 2006 - Good Friday - Father Andrew Green


FIRST READING: Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12
PSALM: 22
SECOND READING: Hebrews 4:14-16; 5: 7-9
GOSPEL: John 18:1 - 19:37

This meditation is not my own, but it is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams' meditation for this Good Friday.

As a novelist, some years ago, put it very well when he described what it was like to arrive in the empty hallway of a monastery in Yorkshire for the first time, there is an impression of intense activity elsewhere.

That is a phrase that comes to my mind, sometimes, when I am in a Church toward the end of Good Friday services. We have had all the readings. We have sung the hymns. We have tried to summon up the appropriate emotions for this overwhelming day - the day on which the whole history of the world depends - and now, the services are nearly over. There are no flowers or decorations. The Church has been stripped of everything that might make it look attractive - an empty hall. We have run out of things to say and to do. Yet, it often feels just like the empty hallway of the monastery - intense activity elsewhere.

At the end of a Good Friday service, we get to the point where nothing we do will be or feel adequate to what is being remembered, and that is completely right; because what matters on this day is what is done elsewhere - done by God, somehow using the stark injustice and horror of the execution of Jesus to turn around the way the world works - intense activity elsewhere.

As if you could hear, faintly, a workman hammering steadily away at the blank surface of human self-satisfaction and self-deception and an irregular sound of plaster dropping to a distant floor. That is not an intimidating feeling. It is not that we have an appointment we mustn't miss, and we don't know which door to walk through, or which staircase to go up. In this empty hallway, there is nothing expected of us, at this moment. The work is out of our hands, and all that we can do is wait, breathe, look around.

People sometimes feel like this when they have been up all night with someone who is seriously ill or dying, or when they have been through a non-stop series of emotionally-demanding tasks - a sort of peace, but more, a sort of limbo, in an in-between moment - for now, nothing more to do, tired, empty, slightly numb, we rest for a bit, knowing that what matters is now happening somewhere else.

The pity is that so much of the atmosphere in Churches these days during services and between services never really gives people that sense of being able to rest, because the work is being done elsewhere. Instead, it feels to regular worshippers, let alone anyone dropping in, busy and anxious, as if the worst thing that could ever happen would be for silence to fall, and for people to have to face the fact that they weren't in the driving seat any longer.

So, it becomes more and more important to get at least one day right - to allow Good Friday to announce its own particular message, as we strip the Church of decorations, and forget the ceremonies and formalities, and end up in a bare hallway, just looking around and settling in, quiet for a moment.

It is a time when we who are Christians might well ask how we can re-think some of what we do the rest of the time to stop what happens in Church from being just a frantic assertion of ourselves and our religious busy-ness, because it isn't us, as Christians, as religious human beings who are in the lead, heroically making the world a better place. Humanly speaking, our record in this is patchy. It is good for us to shut up and sit down occasionally. Our task is both very simple, and very hard - to create a kind of rest and quiet that begins to tune people's ears to the impression of intense activity elsewhere. That would be worship worth the name - a space for the heart to grow into.