When Silence Falls
A Good Friday Written Reflection · John 19:31-42, CEB · Witnesses: Encountering Jesus When It Matters Most
McPherson First doesn’t hold a Good Friday service this year. Instead, I’m sharing this reflection for you to sit with today. Read it slowly. Read it in the silence of the day. Let it be your Good Friday worship.
There’s a moment after the crisis ends when you finally have to face what happened. The emergency is over. The frantic energy drains away. And you’re left standing in the silence, wondering what to do next.
You’ve been there. The diagnosis has been given, and now you’re sitting in the parking lot. The funeral is over, and everyone has gone home. The relationship has ended, and the door has closed. The worst has happened, and you survived it—but now what?
Some moments don’t call for heroics. They call for something quieter. For showing up when showing up is all you can do. For performing small acts of dignity when the world has been stripped of meaning.
We know how to respond to emergencies. We spring into action. We make plans. We fight for solutions. But what do we do when the fighting is over and we’ve lost? What does faithfulness look like when hope lies dead and buried?
Tonight we stand in that in-between space. The crucifixion is over. Jesus is dead. And two men who spent years hiding their faith are about to discover what it means to show up when everything has fallen apart.
Throughout Lent, we’ve been walking with witnesses—ordinary people who encountered Jesus when it mattered most. We’ve seen grief meet hope at Lazarus’s tomb. We’ve watched power kneel with a basin and towel. We’ve stood with disciples at a final meal and followers at the foot of the cross.
Tonight, on this darkest day, we meet two more witnesses: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Their story shows us that sometimes the most faithful response isn’t bold proclamation—it’s quiet presence. Sometimes faith looks like burial spices when resurrection seems impossible.
On the night of May 4, 2007, an EF5 tornado tore through Greensburg, Kansas—a town about two hours southwest of here—and destroyed ninety-five percent of everything standing. Eleven people died. Nearly every home, business, and church was flattened, including the Greensburg United Methodist Church—its cross-topped steeple ripped away, sanctuary torn open, pews filled with rubble.
Within days, FEMA arrived. The National Guard came. News crews broadcast the devastation. And then, gradually, they all left.
But United Methodists from across Kansas kept coming. The Kansas West Conference—now part of our Great Plains Conference—mobilized district by district. The Salina District sent a liquids trailer. The Hutchinson District sent a hot foods trailer. The Wichita East District brought tools. UMCOR sent an emergency grant and a disaster response coordinator to work alongside the conference. Volunteers arrived and stayed for months. Long after the cameras left, they were sorting through rubble, salvaging what could be saved, rebuilding homes for families who had no insurance and nowhere else to turn.
No one covered their work on the evening news. They were simply the people who showed up the season after, when the crisis was over and the real grief was beginning. They couldn’t undo what happened. But they refused to leave the wreckage untended.
That’s where we find ourselves tonight.
John’s account of Jesus’ burial reveals an unexpected pattern in how God calls people to service. Throughout his gospel, John has introduced us to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus as cautious believers—men whose faith stayed private, protected, hidden in the shadows. Joseph was a council member who kept his discipleship secret “because he feared the Jewish authorities.” Nicodemus was the Pharisee who came to Jesus “at night,” asking his questions where no one could see.
These aren’t the disciples we expect to step forward. Peter, James, and John had declared their loyalty publicly. They’d seen the transfiguration, been present at every major moment. Yet when Jesus dies, they’re nowhere to be found. Instead, the men who emerge are the ones who spent years hiding.
God’s call doesn’t always come in dramatic moments of clarity. Sometimes it arrives in the wreckage, when there’s nothing heroic left to do. Joseph and Nicodemus aren’t called to save Jesus—that ship has sailed. They’re called to honor him. They’re called to perform the unglamorous work of tending a body, wrapping it in cloth, carrying it to a tomb.
This mirrors other biblical call narratives in surprising ways. Moses was called at a burning bush, but he’d already fled Egypt in failure. Isaiah saw a vision in the temple, but only after King Uzziah died. Paul encountered Christ on the Damascus road, but only after participating in Stephen’s murder. Again and again, God’s call arrives not at our strongest moments but in the aftermath of loss, failure, and endings.
The call Joseph and Nicodemus received wasn’t to grand ministry. It was to show up with what they had—linen, spices, and willing hands—when everyone else had left.
As United Methodists, we believe something distinctive about calling: faith that stays private eventually needs to work through love.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, borrowed a phrase from the apostle Paul that shaped everything he taught: “faith working through love.” Wesley insisted that genuine faith can’t remain an interior experience. Real trust in God moves outward into action, into care for others, into tangible service.
Joseph and Nicodemus had believed for years. Their faith was real—but it was stuck. It took the crisis of the cross to unstick it, to move it from private conviction to public love. Seventy-five pounds of burial spices is faith finally working through love. Asking Pilate for the body is hidden belief becoming visible action.
This is what God’s call looks like for most of us: not a dramatic voice from heaven, but our quiet faith finding the courage to act when it matters most.
The good news is that God doesn’t wait for your faith to be ready. God doesn’t require a bold testimony or a public track record. God uses the faith you actually have—even faith that’s been hiding for years, even faith you thought was too cautious or too late.
Joseph and Nicodemus had spent years believing in the shadows. By every measure that mattered to the other disciples, these two were failures—secret followers who never spoke up when it counted. And yet God chose them for the most intimate act of love in the entire gospel: preparing the body of Jesus for burial. The disciples who declared their loyalty in public were gone. The men who had stayed hidden were the ones God called forward.
That means your imperfect, cautious, long-hidden faith is enough. The faith you think is too small? God can work with that. The calling you’ve been putting off because you don’t feel qualified? God has a history of choosing people who feel exactly that way. The same God who saw something in two frightened council members sees something in you—and the call is already on its way.
Joseph and Nicodemus show us that God’s call often arrives not in moments of triumph but in seasons of loss. Their example speaks to where we find ourselves today—and it asks an honest question: Is your faith stuck?
In grief and crisis, we often feel paralyzed. We don’t know what to say. We can’t fix what’s broken. Joseph and Nicodemus couldn’t save Jesus either. But they could show up with what they had. Sometimes the most faithful response to crisis isn’t grand action but quiet presence: sitting with a grieving friend, bringing a meal to a family in chaos, simply being there when words fail. You don’t need to have answers. You need to have hands willing to help.
In church ministry, McPherson First has its own quiet versions of this story. Our Congregational Care team visits the homebound. Volunteers show up to prepare funeral dinners, setting tables and washing dishes so grieving families don’t have to. These aren’t glamorous ministries. No one applauds the person who stays late to clean up after a funeral lunch. But this is exactly the kind of service Joseph and Nicodemus modeled: showing up to do what needs doing when others have gone home.
And here’s the harder question: some of us have been believing in the shadows for a long time. We’ve kept our faith private, comfortable, low-risk. We’ve meant to step forward, but the right moment never seemed to arrive. Joseph and Nicodemus waited years too. It took death itself to move them from private belief to public love. What will it take for us? What if the crisis we’re already standing in—the grief, the uncertainty, the moment that stripped away all our excuses—is the very thing God is using to unstick our faith?
As United Methodists, we make five promises when we join the church: to support the church with our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. Tonight we focus on service—using our gifts to help others, especially in the quiet, unglamorous ways that matter most.
This week, look for your Joseph-and-Nicodemus moment. Pay attention to the places where everyone else has moved on and someone still needs tending. It might be a coworker going through a hard season who has stopped getting check-in texts. It might be a neighbor whose loss is six months old and mostly forgotten. Show up with whatever you have—a meal, a phone call, your presence in the room—even if it feels inadequate. Especially if it feels inadequate.
If you work in caregiving, healthcare, hospice, education, or social services, recognize that your daily work is this kind of calling. You tend to people in their hardest moments, and what you do is holy work.
And if tonight has stirred something in you—a sense that your faith has been stuck, that it’s time to move from private belief to visible love—consider joining a Grace Group, where a few others are asking the same honest questions and taking the same small steps together.
Tonight we stand where Joseph and Nicodemus stood—in the silence after the crisis, holding what remains, wondering what comes next. You may be sitting in your own version of that parking lot, that empty room, that closed door. The worst has happened, and you’re still here.
The good news of this darkest night is that showing up is enough. Linen and spices and willing hands—that’s all God asks. Not heroics. Not answers. Just your quiet, imperfect, finally-unstuck faith, offered in love. Even now. Especially now.
Will you pray with me?
God of the cross and the tomb, give us the courage of Joseph and Nicodemus—to show up with what we have when the world has fallen silent. Unstick our faith. Move us from hiding to love. In the name of the one we tend tonight, who is not finished yet. Amen.