Details and Silence: Good Friday Meditation

We gather tonight to reflect and meditate on the events of this week which took place close to 2,000 years ago. But first, a question.

What do you have yet to do before Sunday?

For some it is a scary thought as your mind immediately ran to the million things you have to do by Sunday. I share the scariness of my “to-do” list; and I am not even hosting a family gathering or a meal. I rarely ever make a to do list in the traditional sense anymore because I easily become paralyzed by how long it is and how little time I have to do it.

This evening I want you to put on your imagination caps if possible. It is easy for me to say because I still have a pretty vivid imagination but not as good as I used to, I am certain. Unfortunately life has a way of trying to get us to stop imagining things. Yet, this is important for us to do as we engage Scripture because sometimes I miss things when I don’t put myself in the story. Since we already “know the rest of the story”, as they would say, we can miss the power, the confusion, the tension of the story as we rush through until we get to “the end” or “the good parts”

Luke 23:47–55 NIV

The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, “Surely this was a righteous man.” When all the people who had gathered to witness this sight saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away. But all those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things. Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council, a good and upright man, who had not consented to their decision and action. He came from the Judean town of Arimathea, and he himself was waiting for the kingdom of God. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid. It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin. The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it.

Details are important.

I am not a big detailed oriented person, instead I tend to naturally be big idea mindset. Neither is a bad thing and in fact we need both in our churches. Sometimes us big idea people need to learn from the detail oriented to know how to better plan things. However, you detail oriented ones need to remember the bigger picture and not stress as much about the little points.

Luke gives us some details in his account of the death of Jesus. Maybe not what we would want, but it what we have.

Silence is necessary for life.

As a shirt I had once said, “Duct tape is silver. Silence is golden”. Yet, we live in a world where silence is harder to find. Truth be told, most of us don’t want silence. Silence feels “wrong”. Silence feels like we are failing and not being productive. Yet, the story of Scripture is filled with stories of silence. In our passage this evening we have plenty of silence.

We don’t have the Resurrection without the silence.

When I realized this my next though, hopefully from the Spirit, was this, “I wonder if we as modern day Christians don’t experience more resurrections in life because we refuse to go through the silence of life”.

Because until I let things truly die, they cannot be brought back to life. Luke doesn’t want us to miss this important detail.