Day Thirty-Nine

Day Thirty-Nine // April 10 // Abandoned to God (Good Friday)

“Good Friday is not about us trying to ‘get right with God.’ It is about us entering the difference between God and humanity and just touching it for a moment. Touching the shimmering sadness of humanity’s insistence that we can be our own gods, that we can be pure and allpowerful.” – Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People –

Great poetry and the cadence of angels capture the joy of resurrection. On Good Friday, words escape. We cannot bear to look at the Son of God suspended between heaven and earth. We cannot really imagine the horror. The pain. The shame. The sins of humanity crushing the brow of our Jesus. After the searing agony of those hours, He utters: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). And with those words, He breathes His last breath and abandons His earthly life to God.

What does is mean for us to be still and touch this moment? To realize beyond all our agendas, pretense and hypocrisy that we can’t save ourselves. That

ultimately, to find eternal life we too must pray, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Actor David Niven recounted a story he was told about: it was an event that took place in 1940, in the waters just off Dunkirk, France. World War II had begun. The Nazis had overrun the European continent, had destroyed the French army, and had pushed the British Expeditionary Force to the point of annihilation. As that army waited for rescue from across the English Channel, thousands of soldiers and civilians were trapped. Three thousand of them crowded onto a rescue ship sent from Britain called Lancastria. Listen to what Niven was told: “They were just pulling up the anchor when three dive bombers came. One bomb hit, went down the funnel, and blew a huge hole in the side; and she quickly took on a terrible list. In the hold, there were several hundred soldiers. Now there was no way they could ever get out because of the list, and she was sinking. And along came… a Roman Catholic priest, a young man in a Royal Air Force uniform. He got a rope and lowered himself into the hold to give encouragement and help to those hundreds of men in their last dreadful hour… knowing he could never get out, nor could they. The ship sank and all in that hold died. The remainder were picked up by the destroyers and returned to England to the regiment I was in, and we had to look after them, and many of them told me that they were giving up

even then, in the oil and struggle, and the one thing that kept them going was the sound of the soldiers in the hold singing hymns.”

In our hour of trial, do we sing hymns? Do we trust our lives to the One who bore the cross for us? Can we say “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Let’s don’t be too quick to get to Easter. Let’s don’t be in haste to change the channel. We need to linger here. To touch this moment. Here, we learn who our Savior is. Here, we remember the Source of our strength.

We need to reflect on the words of Charles Wesley who touched that moment:

“Was ever grief like Thine, Jesus, Thou man of woe! The visage and the form divine, Why were they mangled so? That man through Thee restored God’s image might regain, And by the sorrows of his Lord, In joy eternal reign.”