On this Good Friday we come here to remember Jesus and his sufferings in this service of darkness. When he instructed us on using the elements of the Lord’s Supper he said, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” I would like to reflect on that with you for just a few minutes this evening.
Our lives are full of symbols. The more complex a society becomes the more symbols we use. We greet each other with a handshake, a symbol of welcome and acceptance. We are surrounded with symbols pointing to reality, giving identity and meaning, offering beauty, expanding awareness and sometimes manipulating us; everything from road signs to names to titles. Flags and words and numbers are all symbols pointing to a reality. Pictures, paintings, TV advertisements, on and on, all are symbols pointing to something else. Some of us have jobs that deal almost totally with such symbols. And sometimes symbols change in their meaning over time, some words do not mean the same thing they meant 10 years ago. In Jesus time the cross was a symbol of the greatest curse; being hung up – rejected by earth and refused by heaven.
Our service this evening is very simple, but rich in symbols that carry powerful messages about truth: the cross, bread and wine, candles portraying light, and life, and the darkness of their being extinguished pointing to darkness and death. Christian symbols carry profound messages.
In giving the Lord’s Supper Jesus understood the use of symbols in some special ways because he understood the rituals of the Old Testament. They were all symbols pointing to him: lambs sacrificed and rams taken out of the camp with people’s sins laid on them. He told us to use common bread and wine that would create images and memories of him, his suffering on the cross, and his resurrection.
The first thing we need to know about symbols is that they move from being just a sign to a personal experience when we have faith. For example, we come here and see a cross, and it has personal meaning for us because we are Christian. We would need to talk a long time to say everything that symbol means to everyone in this room. If a person did not know anything about Christ, it would probably be no more than a rather unusual decoration.
Jesus said, “Use these signs in remembrance of me.” How do we remember? I find it a fascinating thing that our minds have a two track memory. On one track we remember symbols: words, pictures, scenes, facts, situations. On the second track we remember feelings. I am sure you have all experienced being in a situation that had similar dynamics to something you experienced before, and found previous feelings returning. Maybe you heard a song on the radio, and suddenly you experience a whole set of feelings that your mind is recalling even before you remember the facts. On many occasions in my ministry I have seen people singing in church with tears running down their faces, perhaps because the song we are singing was a favorite of someone they have lost. Sometimes the feelings we experience seem strange and out of place because we do not immediately recall the original situation. It is common for me to experience grief on the anniversary of the death of my dad even before I recall that it is the anniversary of his death. I feel sad and am not sure why, and then I will recall what time of year it is.
Our Christian symbols call to mind our personal experiences with the Lord. But there is another kind of memory at work here as well: it is collective memory. There is a kind of memory we share with our families or with our community that comes through hearing the stories over and over, knowing the history. That collective memory is also a part of our identity.
I had an experience that demonstrates collective memory. You know how children are often fascinated by stories about their parent’s youth. My boys used to ask me question, and I would tell them stories about my growing up. One night I was telling them a story about my great grandfather, describing him in some detail. My dad happened to be listening to all of this with some humor. At the end of the story he said, “I could not have told that better myself. How did you know all of that?” My immediate response was, “I remember it.” He laughed, “Your great grandfather died before you were born.” I had heard the stories so often at family reunions and from my dad that it had become a part of me. I remember it as if it were my own experience. In the Christian Church we have a collective memory that comes from telling the stories of the Bible, from experiences of Christians – a collective memory that is merged with our personal memories.
What happens when we remember, when the symbols and the feelings are recalled with intensity, when the drama of our memories are merged with the collective memory of God’s family? It is a moment of reliving, experiencing again, something that comes out of the past but is now a present experience for us.
We begin to see that when Jesus said, “Do this is remembrance of me,” he is talking about something far more profound than casually recalling some event. This is an instruction for us to “live again” the events, the wonder, the drama of God’s gracious love – not only in general, but specifically for us. We are called to remember, to relive it, to stand again with Mary and John at the foot of the cross.
This is really what this service is about tonight. In its simplicity of telling the story again with the scripture passages, we relive in memory the darkness surrounding the atonement he made for us. It is not just an historical event, it is a part of who we are, a part of our experience, a part of our very identity. We use these symbols to jog our personal and collective memory. Jesus calls us to remembrance tonight, to a communion that shares an experience of being loved in a way that cannot be paralleled. We shudder in the darkness of hatred. We ache in the reality of betrayal by people he loved, and feel the pain of the darkness of desertion and broken trust. We weep with the agony of his spirit in Gethsemane, and feel the brokenness of disunity. We stand in awe of his going through the darkness of his dying and the surrender to the will of the Father and the grave. We wait in darkness for the joy of his resurrection. We do this in remembrance of our Lord.