God Accompanies Us Even to the Grave

God Accompanies Us Even to the Grave

St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD

April 4, 2026

Holy Saturday

Job 14:1-14

Psalm 31:1-4, 15-16

1 Peter 4:1-8

Matthew 27:57-66

Today is the strangest, most in-between, day of the church year.

The Good Friday shouts of “Crucify him!” and Jesus’ words from the cross – “It is finished” - are still ringing in our ears.

But, at the same time, we are so close to Easter joy.

The Altar Guild and the Flower Guild are already at work, decorating the church for tomorrow morning’s glorious celebrations.

And lots of other people – the church staff, the choir – have been working so hard to make for us a meaningful and beautiful Easter.

At the same time, let’s just admit it, much of the world did not pay much attention to Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, and, beyond the baskets filled with eggs and candy, the world won’t pay much attention to Easter, either.

And Holy Saturday? Even the church is mostly ignoring our strange little gathering at the tomb this morning.

But it’s important for us to be here.

It’s important for us to be here to remember the familiar words of the Creed that probably roll off our tongues without much thought: Jesus “descended to the dead.” 

It’s important for us to be here to witness to the hard, cold truth that we would much rather skip right over: Jesus the Son of God was dead and buried.

So, as I mentioned in my sermon yesterday, this Holy Week, I’ve been thinking a lot about “accompaniment.”

I’ve been reflecting on God’s great desire to accompany us thorough our lives, celebrating the joys and giving us the courage and strength to face our challenges, to endure our losses.

Accompanying us has been God’s great desire right from the beginning.

Yesterday, I talked about the story from way back in the beginning, when Adam and Eve had done exactly what they were told not to do and they were hiding from God in shame and fear and loneliness – all new and unpleasant experiences for them. 

And God came through the garden, calling out to his creations:

“Where are you?”

From the start, God has wanted to be our companion.

And Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s great desire to accompany us – to accompany us even through rejection, suffering and apparent defeat, to accompany us even to the grave.

Over the centuries, Christians have been understandably curious about what, if anything, was going on during this strange and shadowy time when Jesus was dead.

Obviously, this knowledge is beyond us, but there is an ancient Christian idea called the “Harrowing of Hell.”

The idea is that not only did Jesus “descend to the dead,” but he liberated the people who had been held there since the very beginning.

I like to think that Judas was the first person liberated – that God would continue to accompany even the person guilty of the worst betrayal.

But most artists who have depicted the Harrowing of Hell have imagined that it was Adam and Eve who were first led by Jesus to freedom, no longer hiding from God in fear and shame, but answering God’s call to new life.

Accompanying us has been God’s great desire right from the beginning.

In and through Jesus, God accompanies us through life, to the grave, and finally, as we’ll celebrate in just a few hours, to new and everlasting life.

Amen.

God’s Desire to Accompany Us

God’s Desire to Accompany Us

St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD

April 3, 2026

Good Friday

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Psalm 22

Hebrews 10:16-25

John 18:1-19:42

Over the last few Sundays in Lent, we heard stories of Jesus performing amazing signs – signs pointing to profound truths about God and us.

Jesus gave sight to the man born blind – a sign that it’s in and through Jesus that we are truly able to see – able to see who God really is, able to see who we really are.

Jesus raised from the dead his friend Lazarus – a sign of the new life that God offers all of us in and through Jesus.

And there’s the sign we didn’t hear this year, but I mentioned it in my sermon a couple of weeks ago: Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana – a sign of the overflowing abundance that God offers all of us in and through Jesus.

And now today, on this most solemn day of the Christian Year, we recall another sign – Jesus’ suffering death on the cross - a very different kind of sign, for sure – but a sign, nonetheless, a sign pointing to the most important truths about God and us.

This year, as I’ve been praying and thinking about Holy Week, I’ve returned to another painful and moving moment in the Bible.

The story goes that way back, at the very beginning, in the garden, God gave the first man and woman everything – beauty, peace, abundance, each other – and, most of all, God shared God’s presence, God’s companionship.

God was with Adam and Eve in the garden.

There was, of course, just one restriction: Adam and Eve were not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Well, we know the story – and, even if we don’t know the story, we all know human nature well enough to know exactly what was going to happen.

Eating that forbidden fruit opened the eyes of the first man and woman, and suddenly they became acquainted with shame and fear and loneliness, the new and self-destructive instinct to try to somehow hide from God.

And then there here’s the moment I’ve been thinking about:

We’re told that God comes through the garden looking for God’s creations, calling out to them – calling out: “Where are you?”

“Where are you?”

Such a sad and heartbreaking moment – a scene that reveals, right from the start, God’s great desire to be with us.

God’s desire to accompany us.

Fortunately, God never gives up on us – never stops loving us - never loses the desire to accompany us.

And God’s most unexpected and most daring attempt to accompany us is Jesus.

In and through Jesus, God comes among us in a new and unprecedented way.

God goes "all in" on human life.

 

God experiences our gifts and challenges: the helplessness of infancy, the learning of childhood, the love of parents, the joy of friendship, living in community with family, friends, and neighbors.

God also experiences fear, dread, frustration, loneliness.

In and through Jesus, God accompanies us through it all. 

In the gospels, Jesus gathers his band of followers – a group of flawed and endearing people, just like us.

Jesus accompanies the most unlikely people, the lepers, the tax collectors, the woman caught in adultery, the Samaritan woman at the well, the blind and the frightened and the grieving, the messed-up.

Jesus accompanies the rich and the poor, revealing to all of us who God really is and who we really are.

This most wonderful story of God accompanying us – this story seems to end in Jerusalem, seems to end with betrayal, cowardice, the frenzy of the crowd, the brutality of empire. 

This story of God accompanying us seems to end on the cross with Jesus’ great faithfulness and suffering.

God accompanies us close enough to know vulnerability, abandonment, and terror, close enough to experience even death.

And it’s only because we know that the cross is not the end of the story that we can dare to call today “Good.”

Unfortunately, for most of the past two thousand years, Good Friday has been anything but “good” for our Jewish neighbors.

For much of our history, during Holy Week and especially on Good Friday, Christians have blamed all Jewish people, both in the first century and in the present day, for the suffering and death of Jesus.

Christians have even sought to avenge Jesus’ death by terrorizing and killing Jews. 

It’s hard to imagine anything more wrongheaded – anything more contrary to Jesus’ life and teaching.

But all too often, Christians have forgotten, or chosen to forget, that Jesus and all his first followers were Jewish – that the gospels are Jewish documents – and that a story that may sound to us like “the Jews versus Jesus” was actually a conflict among the Jewish people.

So, in today’s service, we’ve taken some steps to address this tragic history, in our small way trying to break this cycle that has caused so much fear and bloodshed through the ages.

So, as you heard, in the Passion reading we’ve referred to the “Judeans” rather than the “Jews” – an acceptable alternative translation that puts some linguistic distance between the people of the first century and the people of today.

And in a few moments, we will pray for our Jewish elder siblings in faith, the people of the Covenant which God has never broken, will never break.

These changes are especially important in our troubled time when antisemitism is again on the rise.

And also, blaming a particular group of people for what happened to Jesus two thousand years prevents us from seeing what really happened.

Jesus was a victim of state-sponsored violence, a victim of religious and political leaders conspiring to get rid of someone whose calls for justice threatened their power – and these religious and political leaders had no trouble inciting the crowd to turn against the blameless teacher and healer from Nazareth, this different kind of king who rode into town on a donkey and would not defend himself.

And so, once again, people just like us, sinned, rejecting God’s desire to accompany us.

And they nailed the Son of God to a tree.

Back near the beginning, back in the garden, God called out to God’s disobedient and frightened creations:

“Where are you?”

Fortunately, God never gives up on us – never loses the desire to search for us, to accompany us.

And even when the worst thing happens.

Even when hate and violence and death seem to win.

Even when all hope seems to be lost.

God still does not give up on us – God still desires to accompany us.

Jesus’ death on the Cross is a sign – a most powerful sign - of God’s love for us.

Amen.