Selah2020: Pause and Reflect

[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube^[1], April 2021]

Should Good Friday be a time of celebration or mourning? Should our return to ‘normality’ be celebrated or mourned? Do we need time to lament the past year?

It’s Good Friday tomorrow and whilst planning our service myself and Daz had a bit of a conversation about you know ‘what’s the feel of the service? do we go for a kind of a lively celebratory kind of mood or do we go for a sombre reflective mood because the reality is, we are Easter Sunday Christians and therefore we view our faith and review Good Friday through that particular lens. We read the Good Friday story and we know that there is hope, we know that everything’s all right in the end, We know that Jesus is resurrected and we know that Jesus’s death on the cross means life for us. We know what the cross means but does the hope and joy of the Easter Sunday take away the pain and anguish of the Good Friday?

You see, I don’t think it does. I think it’s a really sad and horrific story where Jesus is broken physically completely and that when we hear that story we should recoil in disgust, we should shout out in despair, we should shout at the injustice of it all and perhaps we should be asking ourselves ‘you know, if I was there what would I do? If I was a friend of Jesus would I run away and desert him, even deny him?’ and if I was the crowd would I switch from shouting his praises to instead shouting for his execution.

Perhaps this is why despite the fact that we are Easter Sunday Christians, despite the fact that we know that everything works out in the end, for the last 2,000 years we have spent more time remembering Good Friday than we have remembering Easter Sunday. Through the acts of Communion we remember the death of Jesus Christ, we partake in his blood and his body, and we ask ourselves the question around our own culpability in Jesus’s death, the ways that we have deserted him, the way that we have denied him, the ways in which we have not acted as a true follower of Jesus Christ.

That leads me onto the question: when we finally return to some sense of normality with regard to our church services – potentially this summer, you know – what will the moods be? Would it be lively, would it be a celebration knowing that things are okay again, that we can once again meet together and I’m so looking forward to that time but is there a danger that in having that celebratory mood we can forget the pain and despair of the last year. Perhaps that should be the lens through which we view our return to physical church services, that actually we need to spend time in lament recognizing the distress the pain, the death, the destruction that Covid has caused in the last year.

We ought to recognize that, yes, we’re now returning to some semblance of normality but actually we will never be the same again, and we could perhaps spend time considering the lessons that we have learnt and the ways in which we have changed and the ways in which we must change because this past year has been pretty terrible

Hey thank you so much for tuning in to this midweek message. Do remember to subscribe to our channel and remember that at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning we have our Good Friday service telling the story where we look at the first Good Friday two thousand years ago, and on Easter Sunday it’s really exciting – we have a live service from the church, Neil and Angie will be leading the first bit and then myself and Daz will be doing three baptisms. We’re really excited about that so do join us at half past 10 on Sunday for that.
Thanks for tuning in … ’bye

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[1] YouTube link: Should we Celebrate or Mourn?
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