This Good Friday blog had its genesis in my pastor’s remark in a Lenten sermon, but it sprung to life while on a walk somedays later. The first sermonic thought I had had in 15 months. No exaggeration. Before retirement, I had thought my mind would be pungent, abundant, extravagant with sermon ideas from the lack of preparing them. But nothing, nada, zip, zero in over a year. Then like the exploding in heaven purple tree in Robin William’s 1998 film “What Dreams May Come”, BOOM! There it was.
I was listening to Parkland, originally titled Four Days In November. This 2008 book, made into a movie, sadly so probably, is the best I’ve read on the Kennedy Assassination. I’ve read biographies on Oswald, Jack Ruby, RFK, Jackie, and the unabridged 1964 The Warren Commission Report. I bought it after watching Oliver Stone’s 1993 conspiracy movie about the assassination. I remember the exact date because my wife went into labor with our 5th child. (I had to pause the movie….after getting to a suitable stopping point.) Anyway. You read the Warren report and this Parkland book and you will have all you need to know, or want to know, about those horrible four days.[i]
In the book, I was at the point where Oswald has been shot and being raced to Parkland hospital, the same place two days earlier the mortally wounded Kennedy had been taken. A Parkland doctor who had treated the dying President thought it would be “tantamount to sacrilege to treat Oswald in the same room as Kennedy.” So, he had him moved from Trauma Room One to Two.
That’s when it hit be. It would have been sacrilege. The book takes you literally minute by minute through the brutal assassination. Before this, having previously seen the footage of the First Lady after the shots trying to climb out the back of the moving, convertible limousine in what I can only describe as animal like terror till a Secret Service Agent climbs up the back and stops her, I was immersed in what was happening in the book. I read how she held the President’s mangled head in her lap on the way to Parkland whispering “I love you; Jack, what have they done to you”, and refused to leave his dying body, his dead corpse, or his flag-draped coffin. Yes, it would be tantamount to sacrilege for her husband’s killer to be treated in the same room as him.
But “sacrilege” and not tantamount to it but “sacrilege” is what my pastor had declared Good Friday to be. The Shepherd dies for sheep who love to wander. “Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted” God hangs on tree and we’re not, at least I’m not, the lone disciple or the Mary’s watching. I’m not like the hymn says, “King of grief, I watch with Thee.” It’s sacrilege that we who are no less guilty than Barabbas go scot-free and the only truly innocent man ever to have lived, and is known to be by His judge, is sentenced to death.
I was 22 at the time. I was being held accountable for thousands of dollars of mess hall items that were missing. I was a Second Lieutenant. I had not lost anything but had failed to inventory the mess hall before accepting it. I was 22 but I was in tears, outraged that I was being held accountable for something I hadn’t done.
You know that isn’t even small potatoes? That’s just some spilled milk. And truth be told: even by then do you think I had never stuck another officer with accountability for something I had lost? But my righteous indignation knew no bounds.
Yet, I can sit it Good Friday services, either leading them or worshipping, and sing “Tell me, ye who hear him groaning was there ever grief like His?” without hearing His groan. I can go on to sing “Ye who think of sin but lightly/ Nor suppose the evil great/ Here may view its nature rightly/ Here its guilt may estimate/” and briefly, all too so, feel the weight of my sin, but then it passes.
It’s sacrilege I tell you. He’s suffering, sighing, bleeding and dying and I’m singing without knowing what I’m saying. He’s in hell for three dread hours of our time, but an eternity in God’s, and I’m wondering how long is this service going to take. That is sacrilege.
I always told kids that there would be a lot of one-eyed or blind teenagers if the Lord carried though on Proverbs 30:17, “The eye that mocks a father, And scorns a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it.” If Uzziah is struck dead for trying to prevent the Ark of the Covenant from tipping, if Ananias and Sapphira our struck dead for telling a lie about the exact amount of money they sold property for, if Judas hangs himself after he sees what his sins had done to Jesus, shouldn’t we at least weep bitterly with Peter before our dying Friend on Good Friday?
You know all this, and perhaps because we do the “sacrilege” that should have grown at least to the sacred has gone instead to the same-old, same-old. The Daughter’s of Jerusalem teach us that Good Friday is not to be a pity party for Jesus. But if treating a dying man in the same trauma room the man he had killed was tantamount to sacrilege to a doctor in Dallas, beholding the innocent Man who is God bearing my sins, your sins, the world’s sins should be a sacrilege to us.
The difference being: the sacrilege before us is saving, and had it been avoided we would not be taken to trauma room two but to hell.
[i] I didn’t know that after going through almost a telephone book of pastor’s names looking for one to officiate at Oswald’s funeral, who by the way declared himself an atheist to a reporter’s question, the funeral director got two Lutheran pastors to agree to do it. The book only named one, French, but neither showed up. Wikipedia gives a reason; when they learned it was a graveside service the pastors feared snipers. Parkland gave none not linking the apparently sudden change to an outdoor service specifically to their absenting themselves.
