With Arms Wide Enough

Apr 3

A Good Friday meditation on honesty, solidarity, and the God who suffers with us

There is a heaviness to Good Friday, isn't there? You feel it in the songs. In the scripture. In the silence. I don't know what this says about me, but Good Friday is, believe it or not, one of my favorite days of the church year. And that's because we get to do something that usually eludes us—something we often try to resist.

We get to be honest. And that's why it's so heavy. Because coming face-to-face with the truth can often be hard to stomach. And so we do what we can to numb out. To run. To distract ourselves.

But on Good Friday, the truth catches up to us. We can't run anymore.

When I talk about honesty—when I say "face-to-face with the truth"—I want to be clear about what I mean and what I don't mean.

Because very often on Good Friday, when we hear the story of how the same people who lined the streets on Sunday declaring a coronation would just days later be crying for crucifixion, what's often meant by "telling the truth" is a naming of their seeming fickleness. Their supposed lack of faith. And this "truth" is often extrapolated across generations into our modern context, with finger-pointing and judgment, as if to say, "You did this." This is your fault. You put those nails in his hands. It's your sin that put him there.

No wonder it's heavy.

I've got to believe that the ones who waved palms and shouted Hosanna, "Save us," meant every word of it. And I'm also not sure that anyone suddenly woke up days later out for blood.

I've got to imagine that it took a while to get there. Year after year of looking at the world and feeling heartbroken. Moment after moment of grief and disappointment. Of betrayal and envy. Wounds reopened time and again. Hope that kept being deferred until ultimately it festered, curdled, and metastasized into something else entirely.

This is being human.

I think this is worth being honest about tonight—not to let ourselves off the hook, necessarily, but because the alternative is a sort of violence all on its own. And because it might just lead us to a place of compassion. A sense that maybe there's something more going on in them. And, if we're honest, maybe we also recognize that there's something more going on in us, too.

Because I know the muck and mire that many of you have trudged through. I know the agony. I know the questions that keep you up at night. I know the fear that festers just by existing in the world. In many instances, I know it, too.

It's the most human thing in the world. It's part and parcel of what it means to be us. That there will be grief. That we will be betrayed. We will know what it feels like to be let down. And even despite our very best efforts, we won't just be harmed—we will cause harm. We will say things we wish we could take back. We will wound the people we love most, sometimes without even intending to or knowing it.

I'm not making excuses. I'm just being honest—reckoning with reality.

And so tonight, I'm not here for the pile-on and the finger-pointing. But what I do want to do—what I think the night actually calls for—is to be honest about it and to stay in the room with it. To refuse to run from it or look away. And to refuse to leave you alone in it either.

Because on this Good Friday, when hope feels like the furthest thing from possibility, when our vision is blurred by “the tears of things”—what we need most is not explanation. It’s not condemnation.

What we need is solidarity. We need to know we're not alone.

He doesn't just watch from a safe distance. Instead, he enters the muck and mire of this human existence and stretches his arms wide enough to embrace us and to hold it all.

This is what we see tonight when we look to the cross. What we see is the human one, Jesus—the one murdered by the state because his kind of love was too much of a threat to the powers, too dangerous to leave alive—this Jesus, the human one, sees it all. He knows it all. Every tear. Every breaking. Every fear and anxiety. Every lament and longing. Every lump in our throat and knot in our stomach.

Every wound. Every feeling of shame. Every scar that reminds us of something we'd much rather forget.

Everything.
Everything.
Everything.

With arms outstretched on the cross, he embraces it all. He suffers with us. That's what compassion means—to suffer with. To stay with us. This is what Jesus does on the cross. And it's not about what you did to God. It's about what God is doing with us.

I want to invite you into a practice we call the Sign of the Cross meditation—a reminder that the cross Rome built to break Jesus, we now trace over our own bodies—holding everything we carry with honesty, trusting that the God of compassion, who suffers with us, has arms wide enough to embrace it.

Place both feet flat on the floor, or settle into where you are. Find a comfortable position. If it feels safe and comfortable, close your eyes—or soften your gaze.

Bring attention to your breath. Take some slow, intentional, deep breaths. Not rising above or running from whatever comes up. Just staying with it.