Good Friday Soup

My wife makes delicious soups – the kind that has spoiled the prime consumers, namely me and the kids. When I say spoil I mean that I lose appetite for any other. Would that be labeled as comfort food? Comfort foods carry a risk of feeding only the complacent, those satisfied with the familiar. Today it is Good Friday soup, a vegetarian sort of specialty with caraway and some other spices giving it a gentle unique flavor. Good Friday soup! Period. Enter a slight variation. This year Verna decided (and I agreed) that it would not make sense to cook up this specialty soup alongside some already-created very delicious and amply leftover chicken noodle soup! Also, this Friday noon it would be only the two of us and one of our daughters, who also loves chicken soup!

But it wasn’t Good Friday soup! We are such creatures of habit that I notice it bothered my wife a little bit; she can even start to feel guilty about stuff like this. 😏 All this now gets me thinking – yes my thinker again. It has nothing to do with soup, but … it does. How do we celebrate Good Friday? 

This year again we had a service together with the other churches of our Christian denomination in this city. It was a 'regular' occasion which threw a bit of a curve ball at all of us. After this service we all quietly and clearly knew we had gathered with a difference! The beginning had been as expected - lots of noisy happy hugs and greetings. We like each other and occasional get-togethers warrant lots of warm greetings. On this day, however, unlike previous years when the pianists and/or organists would be hard at it creating the preludes reaching up to high heaven, this time no music; just the noisy greetings.

Then a request for silence. In a simple instructive tone we were informed this would be a time of remembrance; no bulletin with worship order; only brief on-screen graphics and scriptures to lead us along. I was moved by this creativity, at first slightly taken aback by instructs onscreen like “Silence 3 minutes”, but in short order recognized the focused re-enactment of Jesus’ aloneness with a solitary soloist leading us “Were you there?” The suffering, the grief and guilt all occasioned on that day when Jesus died. It was ordered and quiet and choreographed for clarity and focus [Also an important visual to this retired preacher - seemingly good involvement of clergy and congregants of the participating churches]. I was moved by this a seeming promise of new style which will possibly move the church forward. After the scriptures and the silences and the appeal for money from our well known world relief organization, it concluded. We were dismissed with instructions to move quietly out of building, leaving only our offerings with the ushers.😔

Other than these somewhat brusque departure instructions I thought this had been good. Perhaps it's a feature of my creeping age, I really do not need all that foyer noise anyway. I walked out thoughtfully, appreciatively. And then I heard some protestations! What is the purpose of re-enactment? We cannot fully recreate the loneliness of Jesus on that fateful event, so why even try? This is not a movie or a drama. It is Good Friday. Is this not an occasion for prayers and anthems and proclamation? Yes, Good Friday is that, and how can we presume to do that well? Our re-enactments are only haptics at best. We dare not omit worship of Almighty God on this most somber day of the church year. My thinker remembers! I remember also my days of pastoral leadership many years ago; we also tried hard to be theologically correct even while giving believable understandable leadership on these corporate gatherings, and they also followed by critique. Some things do not change!

Back to my Good Friday soup. Like our traditional soup expected on a certain day, so I think it is with the liturgies or the hymns or prayers on certain occasions in certain ways. Some things one needs in order to experience a day the right way. Some things are optional. This was well tested for me during my years of long haul trucking following twenty plus years of service as a pastor. Especially significant/vulnerable to me were those holy occasions of Christmas and Easter. They lived in my faith consciousness as non-negotiables, a soul awareness that never went away. Even with fellow truckers and the traveling public ‘making weekend plans’, etc. I was always aware that for me the real occasion was a faith occasion, not just weekend plans - the founding occasions of my life (John 10:10). If not able to be in assembly (Hebrews 10:25) with brothers and sisters I could spent a whole day clocking up the miles to reach destination, while actually in worship mode, thinking of church services at home or occasionally catching a chapel or church along the way, either of evangelical or ecumenical stripe. Ironically in this frame of mind I would almost always encounter someone – a person of similar mindset, always a good reminder that God has ways of being present with us in any and all circumstances. Chicken noodle soup may serve as well as the Good Friday version.

Special weekends are special only for those in whom the specialness lives. So this year it's a new Good Friday service along with pro and con opinions. I am reminded of the yin yang of life. Given my churchy and my trucker years I know of holy and profane moments in my trucks and I know of them behind pulpits. My Good Friday is not dependent upon services done the way they used to be, nor dependent on new original imaginative modern haptics. 

Within my worship history and my soup preferences, I give thanks that the One who died also came alive in short order, and is available to me still as promised and still so very much needed. It is as Jesus said to his disciples looking ahead to the crucifixion, "I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you" (John 16:7 RSV). For Christian believers it is about new life in the name of the One who came among us and became so spectacularly available after resurrection. That is why the weekend is always in package. Death was so real and so terrible for Jesus and his bungling well intentioned disciples; also beginning of the greatest miracle of all time. He lives. He lives.