When I was in high school we had this ugly dog, he was a dachshund. He was all out of proportion even for a dachshund, boney, big headed, but sweet and gentle and kind.
His mother was a beautiful dog but lacking in character and sweetness, we owned her as well. One day the mother ran off was run over and died. The ugly son soon went looking for her.
We had a call late one night that he had been run over as well. My mother was not well. My father was out of town so I went out to find him. He lay there on the side of the road, and he lifted his head to greet me. He was still alive with a broken back. He didn’t live the night.
Such a sweet and kind creature crushed, suffering horribly and dying.
Have you ever crushed someone who was full of kindness and compassion? Have you ever crushed someone because they were vulnerable? Because you could?
Good Friday. We are confronted by our capacity for cruelty, by our capacity to abuse the vulnerable, for our own advantage, for our own convenience but also because we kind pleasure in causing harm.
Have you ever crushed someone?
Good Friday. We meet God, we finally see God, and we find uncompromising love, indiscriminate compassion, we find friendship.
Everything that God is: poured out for us in Jesus. God offers all of God’s self up for us.
Jesus bathes our feet, heals our wounds, feeds us, enjoys our food and company, he opens our eyes and hearts…and we crush him, mock him, slowly torture, we betray, we abandon, we run away.
In his brightness we see and are overwhelmed by our own darkness.
And our darkness crushes him.
Dead on the side of the road, as the world just goes on by like it’s just another day.
Dead in a ditch on the side of the road, abandoned.
God’s offering to us, poured out in the dust and grime.
Do we do this because we hate the darkness he shows us in ourselves?
Or is it because Jesus shows us the brightness that we all carry, the splendor that shines in us? Is it because we finally saw what God sees in us, something fabulous, and it scares us, that we could be so wonderful? That God could be so in recklessly in love with us?