(Each member of the congregation is handed two toothpicks as he or she enters the sanctuary.)

It seemed like the beginning rather than the end. At least it seemed like the beginning as it is recorded in Genesis 1:2 -- The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep .... The world of so many people seemed formless and empty that Friday so long ago. And darkness seemed to have covered the face of the land with its black mask. It was a moral darkness as well as a physical murkiness.

The one who had come as God-in-person was rejected, but far more than that. Jesus was not just ignored. He was pure, absolute unadulterated truth. He evoked the kind of reaction from various groups and individuals that caused them to shout, "Crucify him!" Jesus set off a chain reaction which continues to some degree even today. People wanted to smother his teaching with tradition or to exterminate it with hate. Some people are still shouting "Crucify him!"

The one who was the object of such scorn was the one who came as the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah. Jesus was the hope which climaxed as the Old Testament story moved forward in an ever increasing anticipation of someone who was to come. The prophets did not have all the exact details worked out. They were not sure of the how and the when, but they knew the what. The Messiah, God's anointed one, was to follow them. Prophets like Isaiah knew that someday someone would come, and his coming 51would be so different, so God-like that the pent-up wrath of 5,000 years would explode on him. Thus Isaiah spoke of him as a "suffering servant."

The Psalmist wrote of him as one crushed and bruised. Whoever he was to be, the writers of the Old Testament knew his life would not be easy. We have the advantage over the Old Testament prophets. We read the story back to front while they had to try to read it front to back. We know now that the one they expected was Jesus of Nazareth.

In Jesus we see that there is something mysterious and even God-like about suffering. Listen to Psalm 22:1 again: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? And consider again Isaiah 53:3: He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hid their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

This is the greatest of mysteries. God and suffering are not opposites. Instead, God absorbs suffering and transforms it into something different. Jesus allowed himself to suffer, not for the sake of pain, but for the sake of me and for you. He endured the cross as his way of saying something like this: "Even while you might hate me, I love you. Although you might seek to rid my world and your consciences of me, you cannot do it. I cannot be discarded like yesterday's newspaper. I cannot be forgotten like yesterday's heroes. There is, in fact, nothing which men and women can do to make me stop loving them, and I am willing to suffer to prove this fact."

This is an amazing fact! Christ, the very son of God, allowed himself to be humiliated and crucified because of what it would bring! What it brought was eternal life which begins here and now. Some people hear the hammer blows which nailed Jesus to the cross as the announcement that the world had rid itself of God. And some rejoice in that fact. They say, "That's enough of this religion business. Now we can get on with life and concentrate on important things like profits and GNP." 52

Yes, some people hear the hammer as such an announcement, but I do not. The followers of Jesus have heard the echoes of those blows for 2,000 years and have heard them as church bells pealing out this word: "People have done their worst! God has done his best! And the scales have tipped in God's favor."

We know the story of Good Friday from looking back over 2,000 years. But in a sense, we do not know all of the story, for we do not know what we would have done had we stood in the crowd as they began to shout, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" It is that uncertainty which makes this day necessary for us. You see, you and I must decide what to do with Jesus even now. You hold two toothpicks in your hands. They can represent several things. They can symbolize the nails which glued that pain-racked body to the cross. They might be the spear that was thrust into Jesus' side as he hung on the cross. Or they can be placed together to form a cross, symbolizing your acceptance of your part of the sin which put Jesus there. The toothpicks can also symbolize your acceptance of the forgiveness which came because of that cross, and your intention to take up your own cross and carry it.

You must decide what this day will be for you and what the symbols in your hands are. Between today and Easter Sunday we may remove any smug comfort we might have. We can be thrust back into the pain and the agony which the disciples felt between the crucifixion and the resurrection. The symbols to do this are in your hands. What will you make of them?