Electric Circuit Rider

“Friday isn’t the worst day”, he said, “On Friday, everything is decided and you just go through it. Thursday is the worst day”, he said, “On Thursday, you have the hope that something will change the inevitable and you know, at the same time, that it IS inevitable.”

That’s what a friend of mine told me the day before his wife moved out. He was a minister, too, so his allusions to Good Friday and Holy Thursday were to be expected and I got them. He knew she was moving out. The marriage had been unraveling for a long time. She had a place to go to. The moving van was scheduled. It was all very civilized and normal.  But he, like Jesus in the Garden, was praying, “Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me.”

Only in his case, I suspect it was more like, “Please, please God, make her change her mind”, knowing full well that she wasn’t going to change her mind.

I’ve often thought about his observation that Friday isn’t the worst day, it’s Thursday. It’s not the day of the funeral, it’s the day you get the call from someone you love like life itself; “They say it’s cancer, and they say that it’s too far advanced for them to do anything about it.”

It’s not the day they make you clean out your desk and escort you out the door, it’s the day you get the 60-day notice that the company will be down-sizing and you look around and know you were the last person hired.

It’s not the day the sheriff comes to escort you out of the house, it’s the day you add up what you have and what you owe and the second figure is so much bigger than the first that you can’t ever, ever make them come out even.

It’s not the day your name gets splashed all over the news as the scandal du jour. It’s the day you realize that soon everybody is going to know what you have been hiding all these months.

It’s not the day you die, it’s the day you realize that the slope you are sliding down physically is only going to end in one place.

It’s not the day they close the church and merge the congregation with the one across town. It’s the day you know that no one in their right mind is going to make a decision other than that.

The Fifth Sunday in Lent is a good time to contemplate Thursday faith. Thursday faith anticipates the worst by believing – or to use Paul’s wonderful phrase “hoping against hope” – that even if the worst happens, good will come out of it.

Both Jeremiah and Jesus have this faith.

Jeremiah is watching his nation’s leaders persist in a course that has already brought them to the edge of utter ruin and it is like watching a train wreck. The outcome is inevitable and disastrous in a way that you and I can barely fathom. The Babylonians were going to destroy Jerusalem and its Temple and the result would be not only the political end of Judah but the end of the religion that Jeremiah’s people had followed since Abraham and Sarah left Ur to go to the Promised Land.

Yet, Jeremiah looks ahead and sees a vision of a new faith arising out of the ashes -  a new and renewed relationship with God that didn’t need a Temple or priests or prophets because “everyone will know the Lord, from the least of them to the greatest” and the Law will be “written upon their hearts”.

Now that he is a “celebrity” who is drawing the interest even of the Greeks, Jesus knows the Powers-that-Be can’t afford to ignore him anymore. They will do everything in their power to discredit and eliminate him; something that crucifixion does quite neatly. Yet, Jesus says that it will be his martyrdom – his being “lifted up (on to a cross)” – that will draw all people to him.

Last Saturday, I was listening to a webcast from the BBC of an interview with Sister Frances Dominica who helped found a hospice for children.  In the interview she talked about a mother whose child was a guest at the hospice who said to her, “A friend of mine visited recently and said to me, ‘your faith must be a great comfort to you in a time like this.’ And I said that it was NOT. But what really helped me was another friend who said, ‘Almighty means that there is no evil out of which good cannot be brought.’”

My friend’s separation from his wife and subsequent divorce almost 20 years ago was really sad and tough on their kids. But both of them have found new lives and new, very fulfilling relationships – and one of their kids recently said to both of them, “You know, in spite of everything, both of you did a really good job.”

It’s really hard to believe on Thursday that Sunday is coming. It’s hard to believe on Thursday that after the pain and the endings there will be new life. It’s hard to believe on Thursday that good will come out of whatever is going to happen on Friday. But remember that you are a child of Almighty God and Almighty means that there is no evil out of which good cannot be brought.