Good Friday
In the name of God. Amen.
A couple of weeks ago, you may
have seen in the news, for the first time in human history, people have seen a
black hole – not an artist’s rendering based on hypotheses, but an image,
formed from light. Of course, by
definition a black hole is unseeable.
It’s an object that is so small and so dense, and contains so much
matter that its gravity is so incredible that nothing can escape – not even
light. And all that we can see is light,
so there’s no way we can see something with a force of gravity so strong that
even light can’t break free.
But we can see its effect. Based on the predictions of great scientists
of the past – including the likes of Albert Einstein – we’ve had expectations
about what a black hole might look like.
And while we can’t see it’s light, they predicted that we might see the
light being pulled into it.
The problem, up until now, had been the distance. The black hole that was captured in the image is some 54 million light years away – at the center of a neighboring galaxy. At such a distance, there is no telescope on Earth that is big enough to be strong enough to capture such a distant, faint sight.
This problem was tackled by a
team of scientists, and among them was a young woman named Katie Bouman – not
yet 30 years old. She is a computer
scientist specializing in imaging, and she helped to develop a protocol for
manufacturing an image based on the observations and recordings of telescopes
around the world.
No one telescope was strong
enough. No one perspective was
sufficient. But together, they could
assemble enough information to get a piece of the picture. Enough to help the computers to be able to reasonably
fill in the gaps. Enough to at least point
us in the right direction, and to give us a glimpse of this driving force in
the cosmos that we’d all been missing.
Throughout human history, God has
been calling us into relationship. God
created us, and set us free, but even then, God longed to be with us. And for just about as long, we have been
striving to see God. We have been
straining to capture what we, ourselves, and we, alone were insufficient to
capture.
When the time was right, a bit of
God’s own self came into the world in the person of Jesus – the one who would
be the Christ. He was the great unifying
force – helping us to fill in the blanks that we’d been missing, pointing us
toward a clearer perspective of what God had in mind for us.
It’s hard to imagine how he could
have been killed. Even understanding the
politics of revolution, even understanding the psychology of the powers that be
feeling threatened by him… Even with all
of the resources we have at our hands, it’s hard to imagine how such a person
of peace and unity could become so reviled.
How this person could travel so quickly from the “Hosannas” of Sunday to
the cries of “Crucify him” today.
As I was driving earlier this
week, though, I had a thought. There
were some tulips down in Morristown that had already passed their peak. They’re such a beautiful flower, that it’s
hard to accept that they’re gone so fast.
But tulips first open as little buds – filled with brilliant color. They seem so perfect that’s it’s hard to
imagine that they’ll soon be gone. But
with each passing day of their brilliant but brief lives, they open a little
wider. Before long their straining to
open wider and wider until there’s nowhere else to go. Their little petal arms open so wide that
they die.
Jesus worked so hard to help us
bridge the divide between God and creation, his arms opened so wide, straining
between us and reaching to enfold all of us in such beautiful and perfect love,
that there was nowhere else to go. His
arms opened so wide, that eventually, there was nowhere else to go, but to the
cross.
We know the rest of the
story. Just like the tulip, when the
petals fall off, and it seems dead to the world – we know it’s only for a
season. We know the tulip will rise
again. On Good Friday, we know that
Easter is just around the corner.
But that’s not the point of
today. Today, the point is to live in
the pain. To mourn the loss. To feel the death, and to know that it’s
real. The rising will come in time, but
we can’t rush it. We have to live here
for a while.
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