Good Friday

Will the dust praise you?  Will it tell of your faithfulness?  - Psalm 30:10
The netherworld cannot thank you.  Death cannot praise you.  - Isaiah 38:18


Death is deeper than I know.  More total.  More final.

I arrived too late for the burial service, so I crept down into the chapel, so often filled with warmth,
light, glory, a Presence that binds heaven and earth, that I fight to know to be more real than I know.  It was dark.  Completely dark.  The light that poured in from outside when I opened the door revealed chairs stacked down the middle, guarding the path to the little grotto like sentinels, barricades closing the way.  I tiptoed around on the carpet and put my face to the ground.  The dark was deepest in the little grotto where Jesus normally sits, majestically.  Tonight it is black.  So appropriately.

I went into the dark and tiptoed up to the black.  I wanted to be with Jesus in the tomb.

There is an absolute emptiness these three days.  The Presence, more real than I can fathom, that binds heaven and earth, is more absent these three days.  He actually died.  He actually descended into the dead, 2,000 years ago.  It is hard for me to fathom because no one close to me has died in a long time (thanks be to God).  It is hard for me to imagine because I already know and await his resurrection come 2 more sunrises.

Jesus was real.  Jesus is real.  Jesus was God.  He is more alive and more real than we know, and the centurion (who really existed, in history) said with absolute good reason at his death: "Truly, this was the son of God."  The earth shook and was eclipsed in darkness when its Creator died.  I can't punctuate that again in writing like I can in speech.  Read it again.  The entire earth shook.  Was covered in darkness.  At the tearing of the natural order: the Source of all creation DIED within it.

My way of the cross with CL this afternoon took me through downtown, weaving through the bases of skyscrapers.  I looked up, straight up, into the sky at the strength and majesty of the steel and concrete.  If Jesus died right now fully in history, instead of just our commemoration, or maybe when He decides to come again, the foundations of the earth would shake, and these skyscrapers would fall on top of us.

As it should.  The foundations of the earth should quake.  Because Life has become dead.  He has gone to the netherworld to free those who have experienced the finality, the absoluteness of death.


In death there is no remembrance of you.  In Sheol who can give you praise?  - Psalm 6:5