Good Friday is an odd holiday. Celebration and festivity seem inappropriate, and attempts at self-induced sadness are a bit contrived. Often this day passes with little contrast to a typical Friday, save for a one-hour church service, if you’re so inclined. Usually we just wait for Easter for remembrance. But something of cosmic and specific significance has happened on this day, albeit some years ago, something worthy of our thoughts and feelings, identification, our very lives. It is difficult to enter into such an event, but we can try. So here are two memories, toward a better Friday.
One year ago I had the privilege of performing Bach’s St. John Passion with the Westmont College choir and orchestra. The Wednesday prior to Good Friday we sang the last portion of this piece in chapel, which is held in our gymnasium. The final chorus of Bach’s tremendous work is a simple, yet profound prayer to Christ having breathed his last: “rest well, rest well, beloved sweetly sleeping, that I may cease from further weeping. Rest well, rest well, and let me, too, rest well.” As the piece concluded in all its somber majesty that Wednesday morning, a deathly stillness settled across the gym. It was a tense, anticipatory, and relieved silence. Was it finished? No one moved; no one spoke. It was as if the whole earth exhaled together and paused in penitent silence before drawing its next breath.
Afterward, a choir member remarked that he had never heard the gym so silent. Such quiet in a usually cacophonous setting is rare, to be sure. Yet there is one moment that I can recall, the only moment I know of to which this can be compared. It happened during the Tea Fire.
As this conflagration raged across Westmont’s lush campus and the greater Montecito area, we took refuge in the gym. Fear nibbled away at each of our minds as the unpredictable inferno outside, driven by gale force winds, consumed our homes and belongings, many things we knew and loved. The evening was anything but peaceful as smoke replaced air in our sanctuary, and as we gathered in small groups around books and cards and guitars to distract ourselves from fearful uncertainty.
News of the increasingly alien world outside came to us over the hours as we learned of dorms burned and homes devoured, of the valiant efforts of firefighters and campus security and staff. Responses ranged from silent disbelief to quaking anguish to stoic determination. All waited together.
Mercifully, fires do not burn forever. Shortly after midnight it was safe to begin evacuating people, some going to homes and churches a safe distance from the devastation. For those who remained, the Red Cross delivered blankets and cots, an antidote to our exhaustion. Adrenaline stopped pumping and fatigue set it. Soon nearly all were fast asleep. At 4:30 that uncertain morning, I stood alone, watching all sleeping, breathing in the smoke-tainted silence. A similar deathly stillness held the whole room in timeless suspense. Interred in this concrete tomb, shrouded in Red Cross blankets, we at last could rest. It was finished.
Such rest was possible because the danger was over. We had passed through the fire. Sleep finally came to us when we could stop fearing and accept the status quo, the point-blank reality that we were okay, regardless of the condition of the world beyond the walls that protected us. And accompanying such acceptant relief was also a tense anticipation of what the next day would hold, when we would rise from our cinderblock grave. And we did rise that Friday morning, uncertain of what would greet us, only to find that we had changed, and so had the world around us.
It is in such suffering that we may identify with our dying Lord, this Good Friday. We ought not fear the death that comes at the end of suffering, because in death we find rest, rest in Christ’s tomb where sin is left to rot and perish, to be buried and forgotten. Death in Christ is rest, and we die willingly, trusting that we will rise rested, renewed, re-created.
May you rest well this Good Friday.
