I have a love-hate relationship with writing. I hate a blank page. I love having words to edit, lots and lots of words. I hate having to write a lot in order to begin to feel creative. I love when the river of prose is flowing. It hate that what I write never seems finished. I love it when I actually like something I've written.
I have a love-hate relationship with gardening. I hate the fallow plot in early spring that so closely resembles a blank page. I love planting seeds and young plants and watching them grow. I hate weeds. I love mulch. I hate dead plants that didn't winter over like the label promised. I love to see the bushes and trees with buds bursting with renewed life and vigor. I hate killing frosts in late spring. I love cold hardy plants. I hate that by mid July, with little time to tend it, my garden will have gotten away from me. I love the growers market where I can buy the vegetables I only wish I'd been able to grow.
I have a love-hate relationship with Good Friday too. I love the liturgy for this day. I hate that so few people participate in it anymore. I love the drama and music that sweeps us up into the story and makes it real again, even though we've heard it a million times. I hate that is has the longest reading of the church year. I love that God was willing to go to such lengths to claim us as his own. I hate that once Jesus has died, we're left with a blank page.
Blank pages: empty, stark, white lined pieces of paper that hold nothing, they reveal gardens not yet planted, and make pronouncements of death - the ultimate blank page.
Blank pages stare back of us, and can, ever so briefly and in the oddest way, have power over us. They simultaneously hold both the promise of what could be, but is not yet, and the reflection of our deepest fear, that the future could be as empty as these pages.
The pages of our life are gifts from God. They were not intend for mischief. They were created to be filled, read, torn, crumpled, retrieved from the garbage, filed, folded, sent, received, returned, buried or burned. The possibilities for blank pages are endless, as are the possibilities for us.
But on this day, Jesus has left us with only a single blank page; and the possibilities for it are both ended and endless. His death reminds us of many things of which we do not wish to be reminded. And the absurdity of the events that drove him to the cross seem bizarre to us: Do they not? How bizarre that Jesus' acts of mercy and kindness, healing and restoration, or that his proclamations of truth and wisdom, could end in this way. Isaiah frames it well:
"By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living.... although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth."
We are vexed, stunned; bewildered by the speed at which injustice is dispensed. And in the same moment, we, ourselves, by our inaction and muted voices, insure the smooth running of the machinery of injustice in every quadrant of the earth. That we play a guilty hand in these events rings in our ears and we are crushed by the horror of it. We are crucified by it.
Easter is another day yet to come, and not tomorrow either. In this moment, we are not left with the promise of new life, or eternal life; from here we cannot see the empty tomb. All we have is a blank page. We must do with it what we can: love it, hate it, ponder it, wonder about it, use it to scheme, to justify, to get real, to get a new perspective, upon it write a letter or plan a garden, embellish it with lovely drawings or silly doodles, sit with it and hear what we had not heard before, or dare to touch it and know the anguish of God.
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