Good Friday

Excerpt from John 18:1—19:42

"So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit."

Reflection by Lillian Daniel

In the weeks after the earthquake in Japan, more than 2,000 swept up on the shoreline in Miyagi. Exhausted rescue workers were shocked at the horror of so much loss of life, but on that very same day, Time magazine reported this incident:

"More accustomed to hearing the crunching of rubble and the sloshing of mud than sounds of life, they dismissed the baby's cry as a mistake. Until they heard it again. They made their way to a pile of debris and carefully removed fragments of wood and slate, shattered glass and rock. And then they saw her: a 4-month-old baby girl in a pink woolen bear suit. A tidal wave literally swept the baby from her parents' arms when it hit their home on March 11. 'Her discovery has put a new energy into the search,' a civil defense official told a local news crew. 'We will listen, look and dig with even more diligence after this.'"

Human hope is an amazing thing. In the face of 2,000 dead bodies, it was the discovery of one single baby in a pink bear suit that gave energy to the exhausted, and gave the rescuers hope once again.

Hope is not logical, it makes no sense from a numbers perspective, and it's not something you can prove. But human beings seem to have been built with a divine microchip inside us, the capacity for hope in the face of suffering. Against the odds we build our case not on the devastating deaths of thousands but upon the shrieking cry for life of one baby in a pink bear suit.

For it was as a shrieking baby that God came to be born upon the earth, as the baby Jesus, to live and to die on Good Friday, and to rise again on Easter in new life.

Prayer

On this sad and solemn day, we remember that a tiny baby and a mighty God have already conquered death.

About the Author Lillian Daniel is the senior minister of the First Congregational Church, UCC, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She is the author, with Martin Copenhaver, of This Odd and Wondrous Calling: the Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers.

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