He Can Even

One service down, five to go. Tonight is feet washing, communion, and stripping the altar. It’s supposed to be solemn, but as it’s the children who come up and carry everything off into the sacristy, it’s not usually very subdued. That’s the problem with these once yearly services. They’re kind of cool, and we all look forward to them, and it’s hard to, how do you say, ‘enter into the spirit’–which is that you walk with Jesus through his suffering, or at least try to pay attention to it for a few minutes. And all the things that happened to him were very difficult and sad, and none of the things that are happening to me are quite at that level.

Which is the point, really. When Jesus, in Lamentations, cries, ‘Is there any suffering like my suffering?’ the answer is assuredly no. There isn’t any of our suffering that comes up close to the suffering of the single innocent man in human history bearing the weight of temptation and sin for all of us who neither fight temptation, nor feel the true weight of all that sin. We can’t possibly understand what it was like for him.

Conversely, though, he does understand what it is like for us. He knows suffering so intimately, so completely–that there isn’t anything that you can experience or fall into or do or endure that you can’t then run to him for help. He knows. And he even cares. He is the opposite of ‘I can’t even.’ Faced with tragedy and despair and evil and injustice and all the niggling unhappinesses of this life, ‘He can even.’

I saw this heart breaking video yesterday in the late hour of darkness after Tenebrae and grieved mightily for this man who lost his son. And then grieved more for his ‘hope,’ which is to just try to make each day a little better than the last. Line your expectations up with reality and then try to accept them, and then make things a little better.

But when reality is that we all die, every single wretched one of us, I don’t see how any amount of acceptance makes that better. You may have water in your glass now, but when you die, there’s no more water.

The cross is all about not having to accept what should really and truly been our portion. The cross is hope in the face of despair wrought by reality. When someone dies, and you can’t get away from it, you can’t go into another room and escape, you can’t move one foot in front of another, and then, worse yet, when you face your own death, when there isn’t any more water in the glass, what then? We all go down to the dust, to Sheol, one by one, inexorably. And there is no hope. Except that God, who loved us with such a great love went down and broke it’s stranglehold. You don’t have to face that deep darkness, that forsaken loss that is the portion of our common humanity. You can grasp on to him, onto the cross, onto his great love. You can fling yourself on his mercy and be rescued, can look forward not to Sheol, but to a new earth, a heaven where your body makes sense with your soul and you’re not always looking into the blackness of your own sin and the abyss of the death that it necessarily brings.

So we strip the altar, because Jesus was stripped, and beaten, and died. And then we go home alive, because death could not keep a hold of him. He rose up and so we will too. We look forward to it with hope.