For months a song has been poking at my brain, saying, “Sing me on Good Friday.”
When James began to describe his vision for the Good Friday liturgy this year, blending jazz kyries and traditional “rebukes” rewritten to speak to today’s ears, I thought, “The song doesn’t really fit in that liturgy.”
The song said, “Sing me on Good Friday.”
Then James said that I Corinthians 1:18-31 would be read after the rebukes—in his paraphrase, the passage speaks of Jesus’ death on the cross as an “embarrassment.”
“Ah,” I thought to myself, “that’s where the song fits.”
The song said, “I told you so.”
I Corinthians 1:18-31 (from Eugene Peterson’s The Message)
18-21The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It’s written,
I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head,
I’ll expose so-called experts as crackpots.So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn’t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.
22-25While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can’t begin to compete with God’s “weakness.”
26-31Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”
The song: “On Our Way Home“ (The Silent Years)
On our way home we found ourselves some shovels
On our way home we dug ourselves some holes
On our way home we buried our old photo albums
Everyone we’ve ever known was in ‘em
Everyone under the sun was thereOn our way home we tried to find Sacramento
Our compass broke, this map’s a joke, and we are turning around
On our way home we realized we had just become big embarrassments
Everyone we’ve ever known’s been laughing
Everyone we’ve ever loved was thereOn our way home the noises that our footsteps made were echoes
And all the thoughts we’ve ever had were hammers that sat in our garages gathering dust
On our way home we won’t go in without someone else holding our ankles
Everyone who’s ever been is in us
Everyone we’ve ever known is here
Linda Worster
