Today is a dangerously honest day for those of us who profess to be Christians. It’s the one day in the church year when we’re forced to confront our own pain and fear and anxiety about what life ultimately holds in store for us. And so this day we call Good Friday doesn’t really make us feel very good at all. In fact, it’s a day which steals our comfort from us because it reminds us that we’re also going to die and it does it in an incredibly graphic and material way. For this Gospel we’ve just heard describes Jesus’ physical pain in such minute detail that we almost feel as if we’re watching some gruesome newsreel. There’s just no way that you and I can escape the blood, the anguish and the hopelessness of this event that we remember today. That time when God allowed Jesus to be crucified and to die. For the reality is, it’s God’s will, not Pilate’s, not the Jewish religious establishment’s nor the pathetic disciples’ but God’s will which is done this day.
It’s that fact, and that fact alone, which causes you and me the biggest problem. Because it forces us to confront a deep...and very troubling question. Can this God of ours really be trusted? Is this the kind of God we can cling to when we feel utterly forsaken and afraid? The reason those questions surface in our minds is because we have to admit that the source of the great discomfort which Good Friday lays bare is the reality of the chaos in the universe. The witnesses of that first Good Friday were never able to convey in words what actually happened on that day. It probably was exactly the kind of experience which was most deserving of that expression we hear so often today, “You just had to have been there!” So it’s not so surprising that what this day communicates to you and to me, who weren’t there, is a sense of confusion and chaos which only serves to trouble our rational minds and hearts.
You and I are creatures of order and control. Most of us place a high value on having our lives under control and relatively hassle free and we work very hard to achieve that. So what do we do with this day? This day when God not only allowed Jesus to die but also allowed nature itself to run amok. The scriptures tell us that on that first Good Friday there were violent storms and an earthquake at midday which was followed by darkness that seemed to cover the whole earth. What makes us even more anxious, as we struggle with this issue of the trustworthiness of God, is the reality that this sort of chaos continues to invade our lives today. All that we know of rationality and normal human behavior defy our attempts to explain how God can allow can allow an earthquake and a tsumani to wipe out thousands of innocent lives as we just witnessed in Japan; or allow someone to gun down a young president on a bright November day; or a space ship and it’s crew, which represented the highest achievements of the scientific mind, to dissolve into millions of tiny fragments; or a mentally disturbed young man gun down an innocent 9 year old who had come to meet her congressional representative on a Saturday morning in January. Who can even begin to explain the complex mix of pain and shame and suffering those events brought to the people who were the closest to the victims or the ones who had the responsibility for their safety? What do you suppose the disciples felt like on that first Good Friday? What to do you think the staff and Secret Service agents felt like on that day in Dallas when John Kennedy’s brain was shattered by that bullet? How do you think the scientists and engineers who had designed that spacecraft felt as they watched it explode into millions of pieces on the TV screens in front of their eyes? Just think how the religious and political establishment felt in Jerusalem when they realized that while they had honored the letter of the law they had also in fact slaughtered the Spirit.
Chaos has been a part of our universe from the very beginning. The scriptures tell us that God created the universe from the void. From the formless matter swirling in space which is only one of the definitions of chaos that you’ll find in the dictionary, “disordered, formless matter, supposed to have existed before the ordered universe”. The other definition you’ll find in Webster’s is the one that seems to describe Good Friday, “complete disorder, utter confusion”! The issue of trusting God essentially means that we have to grapple with the question of what kind of God it is that you and I worship.
As many of you know a whole new science of chaos theory has been emerging for the last 50 years which has presented us with yet another definition of chaos. In fact, experts say that there are only three theories developed in the 20th century that have significance for the future: the theory of relativity, the theory of quantum mechanics and chaos theory. The new science of chaos theory defines chaos as “Lawless behavior governed entirely by law!” As a result of the development of chaos theory a conflict has arisen in the scientific community which is centered around the question of whether the universe, as Einstein believed, is governed by immutable laws of physics with no room for chance or randomness or whether there is, in fact, some order or some law within the chaotic and seemingly lawless behavior of the universe.
About 20 years ago a book was written for non-scientific laypersons which dealt with this issue. Some of you may remember it because it had the provocative title: Does God Play Dice? For what these scientists are proposing with their new chaos theory is that the real question isn’t whether God plays dice. In other words, whether God allows chance or chaos to affect the universe, but rather, how God plays dice. But it just might be that we’ll never find the answer to that question no matter how sophisticated our scientific theory becomes. Because we’re creatures of order and control, our normal pattern is to confront chaotic situations by analyzing and psychologizing them. In this case, however, the why eludes us because we’re still left with the reality of a dead Jesus, a dead President, a spacecraft in pieces, a nuclear reactor leaking radiation and a little girl from Arizona who’ll never celebrate her 10th birthday because the why lies beyond both our control and our understanding.
Ultimately what this Good Friday causes us to struggle with is whether we can trust this God of ours. Whether we, as faithful members of the Body of Christ, can admit that the God we believe in created all that we know from utter chaos and that throughout time events have occurred which defy our ability to explain or even understand them. So it’s probably for that reason alone that it might be very appropriate that we do call this day GOOD. For it’s good for us to stare into these chaotic messes which are so far beyond our control. It’s good for us because it reminds us of what happens when our designs, no matter how ingenious, prove to be inadequate. It reminds us that we’re never in complete control, even when we think that we’re operating at our highest level of intellect, creativity and order. For the reality is that we are the children of chaos. We were born as creatures created from it’s confusion. We were fashioned from it’s corruptible elements by God who shaped us from that mess into God’s own perfect creation.
The real lesson to be learned from today is simply trust. Jesus didn’t solve the age old problem of evil or why events like the crucifixion have to happen. But through the reality of what we’ll celebrate at the Easter Eucharists, Jesus has shown us that it’s possible to live through the chaos of Good Friday triumphantly. So we too shall live through the chaos of our individual lives not by obedience to institutional traditions or scientific theories but rather by trusting in our God and by following the example of Jesus and his ministry of forgiveness and unconditional love which was made possible by his secure faith in God. For if we are able to do that, then we too will be able to live through the chaos of our lives, because we’ll have come to understand and to trust, that if indeed God does play dice, the reality is that God always wins in the end.
AMEN
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