Lutherans of Anchorage hold a joint noon Good Friday service each year. This year, we did 8 stations of the cross. I did the reflection Jesus meeting the women of Jerusalem; it's copied below. Safe travels from Good Friday's night to Easter's morn.
“A great number of the people followed Jesus, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. But Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.” Luke 23:27-28
We don’t know much about these women, these daughters of Jerusalem. We don’t know if they were the standard, professional Jewish mourners at death or if they are genuinely grieving for Jesus.
Does it matter? Have you ever noticed those who weep at funerals and memorials? Often they barely knew the person who just died. They weep for other losses, for loved ones gone long ago, for broken hearts or in anticipatory grief of someone still living. They weep, they wail and they beat their breasts, just like these daughters of Jerusalem.
Jesus tells them not to weep for him but to weep for themselves. Jesus knew there were other reasons to weep. Historically, the city and temple of Jerusalem would fall in the year 70 AD. Jesus also could have reminded them of their situation in life. He could have added: “Weep for yourselves because the guys who wrote the Bible won’t bother with your names. Weep because you live in a world where your gender makes you less of a person. Weep for your children’s children, because two thousand years later, too many still die from war, disease, hunger, and neglect. Weep because there are still executions and sometimes we don’t know the guilty from the innocent.
New York Times foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins spent years covering Afghanistan and Iraq. He recently wrote a book entitled The Forever War. Here is an excerpt:
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The men with guns led the blindfolded man from the truck and walked him to midfield and sat him down in the dirt. His head and body were wrapped in a dull gray blanket, all of a piece. Seated there in the dirt at midfield at the Kabul Sports Stadium, he didn't look much like a man at all, more like a sack of flour. In that outfit, it was difficult even to tell which way he was facing. His name was Atiqullah, one of the Taliban said.
Atiqullah had been convicted of killing another man in an irrigation dispute, the Talibs said. An argument over water. He'd beaten his victim to death with an ax, or so they said. He was eighteen.
By this time a group had gathered behind me. It was the family of the murderer and the family of the victim. The families were close enough to touch. Sharia law allows for the possibility of mercy: Atiqullah's execution could be halted if the family of the victim so willed it.
"Please spare my son," Atiqullah's father, Abdul Modin, said. He was weeping. "Please spare my son."
"I am not ready to do that," the victim's father, Ahmad Noor, said, not weeping. "I am not ready to forgive him. He killed my son. He cut his throat. I do not forgive him."
The families were wearing olive clothes that looked like old blankets and their faces were lined and dry. The women were weeping. Everyone looked the same. I forgot who was who.
"Even if you gave me all the gold in the world," Noor said, "I would not accept it."
Then he turned to a young man next to him. “My son will do it,” he said.
One of the green hoods handed a Kalashnikov to the murder victim's brother. The crowd fell silent.
"In revenge there is life," the loudspeaker said.
The brother fired. Atiqullah lingered motionless for a second then collapsed in a heap under the gray blanket. I felt what I believed was a vibration from the stands. The brother stood over Atiqullah, aimed his AK-47 and fired again. The body lay still under the blanket.
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There are daughters of Jerusalem crying at every moment, somewhere in this world. They weep because we still keep thinking we can crucify the wrong sorts of people and that will be the end of it. They weep for the world that is and the world that should be and the long road between those places.
We weep for these reasons too.
Luke says the weeping, wailing women were following Jesus. Perhaps they still are.
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