Dr. David P. Scaer
My assignment last Lent was the Ash Wednesday sermon. Some may have remembered the reference to my astonishment as a twelve year old to a mathematics teacher who had come to school with what appeared as a bruised forehead. When I asked whether she had fallen and hurt her head, I learned for the first time about the ancient custom of placing ashes on the forehead on the first day of Lent. What was strange to me then seems perfectly natural now. The Book of Job tells the story of a man who has lost his ten children and all his possessions. In his mourning he sits in sackcloth and ashes, scraping the boils on his body. In the agony of both his body and soul, he contemplates how he has offended God. He might as well be dead and fearing to curse God, he chooses to curse the day of his birth and to hasten his death. There is no one who in his or her life time who because of personal or family calamity or embarrassment has not wished that he or she were dead. Christians in confessing their sins are embarrassed in a very profound way and know they are worthy of both temporal and eternal death. The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah commanded the people to put on sackcloth and sprinkle their heads and faces with ashes to show that they had a guilt worthy of death. The church adopted the custom of placing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful to remind them that without God there is no hope.
While we were still living, the prophetic words of Genesis come true for us: "Thou art dust and to dust shalt thou return." We are present for our own funerals and hear the words of officiating ministers "ashes to ashes and dust to dust." Ash Wednesday is the reminder that no one, not even the Christian, can escape the inescapable verdict of death. By ashes we prepare our bodies for burial.
Tonight we are at the other end of the Lenten spectrum. On this Good Friday evening we have not come here to mourn for ourselves and prepare our bodies for death, but we have come here to mourn ofer the death of Jesus and to prepare his body of the Lord Jesus for burial. The enormity of personal guilt can never be appreciated until we contemplate the death of the Son of God. We look at the corpse of Jesus to see the collected guilt of humanity. No longer is it a matter of an evil thought or misspoken word, but now it is a matter of total alienation and estrangement from God.
In Latin countries of Mediterranean and of Latin America, the burial of Jesus is commemorated with processions through the streets carrying replicas of the corpse of Jesus in glass coffins. Tonight we join the first mourners at the cross of Jesus who formed that first funeral procession for the Redeemer. It begins at the cross with Mary, the Mother of Jesus; Mary Magdalene; Mary, the mother of James and John, the disciple John and Joseph of Arimathea. We hear the Savior's dying gasps. We see the cross bar unhinged from upright beam and lowered to the ground. We hear the nails lifted out of his hands and feet and we follow his cortege to the tomb. We are not at the cross to relive history or to remember its more conspicuous moments. We are here to see the collected and individual guilt of all humanity. On this night there is no boasting or pride on what our race has accomplished. Ultimately mankind has accomplished nothing worthwhile. Here is our own self-degradation and self-abasement. On this night let there only be shame.
Burials today are done professionally and clinically. Only the hospital and funeral home attendants handle the corpse and this only under the most antiseptic conditions. At the cemetary even the dirt which engulfs our bodies is hidden with an artificial grass covering. The coffin is lowered into the ground only after the mourners have left. The burial of Jesus had no amenities. Removing the bodies from theie gruesome instruments of torture could have been another day's work. But the sun down of that day was not only the beginning of a high sabbath, the Feast of the Passover. The law said that dead bodies had to be hidden out of sight with none of the usual religious amenities of anointing allowed by Jewish law and practice. Concern for human emotion was pushed aside for efficiency and expediency. It was pathetic sight.
Following the lifeless body of Jesus was the woman who had given him life. Every mother who has lost an adult son can see herself in the pieta statuary of the mother of Jesus cradling his body in her arms. Death is never natural and always hard to understand, but the death of our children is intolerably unnatural. Of his twelve closest friends only one was there. Ten were in hiding and one had hung himself. In fact there was nothing godly or religious about the scene at all. If Jesus was the prophet and spokesman of God on earth, perhaps there was no God. God is life and the source of life, but the crucifixion was the scene of death spelled out in capital letters.
But of course there was much more to story than what the eyes of the few remaining mourners could see. There was even much more to the story than what the Evangelists themselves were telling us. Those who had condemned Jesus and those who had crucified him and those carried his body to the tomb were not the main characters in this story. The one who had condemned Jesus and who offered up Jesus as a sacrifice by his death and who had carried his body to to the tomb and placed him in it was God himself. In Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac, we saw what God was going to do in Jesus. We saw what God was going to do with the body of Jesus when God prepared the grave for Moses that great Old Testament prophet. Often God's saints die alone, but they are never completely alone because God never forsakes them. The psalm says that though my mother and father forsake me, God will never forsake me. Jesus was God's perfect saint. He fulfilled the will of God as no other person before or after him had. If the death of God's saints are precious to him, how exceedingly precious in the sight of God was the death of Jesus. Though Jesus cried out in anguish that God had deserted, God had not deserted him. God himself was burying Jesus, because God simply does not desert his saints. Just the opposite was true. The burial scene of Jesus was God's victorious moment in accomplishing the world's redemption.
Some Christians shy away from burials because either it makes them feel uncomfortable or because they feel it is not worth the expense. But our leaving this world is important to God as coming into this world. The words spoken at Baptism could be spoken at our death: "The Lord bless thy coming in and thy going out from this day forth and even forever more."
Our Lord's death was no more a tragedy than was his birth. Good Friday is no less important than Christmas. In fact Good Friday is the culmination of Christmas. Tonight we see that Jesus accomplished what he came into this world to do. He participated in every facet of our lives. He has experienced everything which we have experienced, even our death and burial. Like us he prayed that God would save him from the hour of death, but like us he was not spared. By his death and burial Jesus prepared for our death and burial. Only by our death and burial can we both be with Jesus and be like him. Now the grave is not strange or alien or frightful to us because by his death he has sanctified our death and consecrated our graves. We lie with him in his grave, so that we that there may also be for us a third day when we shall come out of our graves. The last words which we are hear are not those of Ash Wednesday, "Dust thou art and to dust shalt thou return", but his command to come out of our graves to the resurrection of eternal life.
The words of St. Paul: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures."