Silent Night, Holy Night. These are the first few words of one of our most familiar Christmas carols. The words conjure up such lovely images, so different from the images of Good Friday (Matthew 26:36-27:61, Luke 23:32-49).
It gives us an image of a stable, surrounded by a crowd made up of singing angels and awe-struck shepherds and adoring kings. It’s a far cry from the crowd that flocked to Golgotha—Skull Hill. Mocking and jeering, spitting and sneering, hurling insults as though they were stones, full of hostility and thirsty for blood.
At the stable, we see a wooden manger, filled with soft straw and cradling a newborn, wrapped in soft warm cloth, with that smooth baby skin and two tiny hands with ten perfect fingers. On Good Friday we see two wooden beams, fashioned together in a cross, and on it a man — bleeding and bruised from beatings and whippings and thorns, stripped nearly naked, with soldiers gambling for his clothing at his feet. And those hands: now they are pierced by the nails that fasten him to the cross.
In the stable, there is silence. It’s the silence of a nursery, disturbed only by the gentle rustling of the animals and the cooing of that holy child. In that silent night, God did the holy work of coming to live among us.
On Good Friday, there was silence too. After the screaming crowds had gone home and the wailing women had departed, after the earthquake and the thunder and the sound of the temple curtain being ripped in two, there was silence. The disciples stood at a distance, silently watching as Jesus’ body was removed from the cross and taken away. Then I picture them gathering in a room that is sealed up tight, huddled together in petrified silence, terrified that a knock at the door would mean they were next.
Or maybe their silence is a result of confusion. They have no words to explain what has happened. Just a few days ago they had entered Jerusalem to people waving palm fronds and singing hosannas. Over the next couple of days it seemed like there was nothing Jesus couldn’t do. And then last night one of their own friends had betrayed him, and Jesus had done nothing to defend himself. And now this. How can you explain this?
And then there’s the grief. Jesus had chosen them. He had called them by name, taught them, loved them. They had just eaten a meal with him last night, and today they had watched him die, in the most humiliating and excruciating way possible. He had promised that he would not leave them comfortless, but they are not feeling comforted now. Now they sit in silent mourning.
Meanwhile the two Marys sit across from the stone that seals Jesus’ tomb. They can do nothing for their loved one. They can’t even participate in the rituals that are supposed to help people deal with their grief. They are powerless to move the stone away, and so they simply sit in silent vigil.
It was a silent night.
We know what silent nights are like, too. We know what it feels like to be so afraid of what might happen next that we just want to curl up in a ball and hope the next catastrophe doesn’t find us. We have times in our lives when we are so confused that we don’t know what to do or what to say, so we simply do and say nothing. And we know grief. We know the grief that wrings the last tear and sob out of you. And we know the kind of grief that is so deep that you are afraid that, if you begin to talk about it, you will start to cry and never be able to stop. So you don’t speak of it at all.
We’ve felt the helplessness that the two Marys felt. We’ve been confronted with situations where we wanted to speak out, wanted to act. But we didn’t think anything we could say or do would make a difference, so we remained silent.
Perhaps you’ve even felt the silence from inside the tomb, sealed off from the life you want to have by institutions that try to strip you of your dignity, people who see you only as a stereotype, a society that welcomes some in and keeps others out. Or maybe that stone is one you’ve put there yourself — addiction, broken relationships, bad decisions, poor choices.
Like the disciples, we know silent nights. But we also know something that the disciples did not yet know. We know that in the silence of Good Friday, God was doing Holy Work. In that Silent Night, God was preparing the announcement that would burst out of the tomb on Easter, proclaiming that evil had not won, that sin and death had been conquered, and holding out the promise of new life to anyone who will reach out and grasp it. On Good Friday, God was not silent, and God is still speaking! In our silent nights, God can lead us out of our fear and our confusion and our grief. In our helplessness God can empower us to speak and to act. And God can help us roll away the stones that keep us from being all that God created us to be. In our silent nights, God can do holy work.
On Good Friday, we remember that our Silent Nights can be Holy Nights, too.
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