Good Friday: A Love Story

I never imagined John’s Gospel could be a love story. 

But this is the amazing thing about returning to the same old stories—in God’s Word, there is always something new to learn because the Holy Spirit is always revealing something new.  (I’ve been at this pastoring and preaching thing for long enough that maybe I’ve forgotten stuff I used to know, and maybe that’s why it feels brand new again.)  But the world is always a little different, and God’s Word is connected with the world, so God’s Word is for the moment. 

Anyway, whenever I teach something, I want to know my sources.  If a colleague tells me about some great interpretation or theological idea, I want to know where the story came from.  If possible I want to see it in writing. 

A few weeks ago, while studying John’s Gospel during Lent, one of my colleagues told me about an idea he learned from Fred Niedner.  Niedner has been a professor at Valparaiso University for over 40 years, but in looking up information about him, I learned he got his degrees here in St. Louis—his Master of Divinity from Concordia Seminary, and his Doctorate of Theology at Christ Seminary in Exile, also known as Seminex—the ones who walked out of Concordia Seminary and out of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and started their own seminary program in the 1970s. 

But Niedner has this compelling idea about the church as the bride of Christ.  Which is super cringey to me.  That phrase “bride of Christ” usually makes me gag, for all the gendered, patriarchal themes that get rolled into that idea of Jesus being united with the church like a couple of committed individuals in a marriage. 

But Niedner ties this idea in with John’s Gospel.  And lately I have had to re-learn about John’s Gospel because I always thought it was insufferably long and pedantic and possibly anti-Semitic.  But John’s Gospel was the last of the Bible’s Gospels written after Jesus died, around the year 100, written after the emperor Domitian outlawed Christianity in the Roman Empire and broad, systematic persecution began. 

Fred Niedner taught about John’s Gospel and mentioned this idea of the church as the bride of Christ in several sermons and written essays, so here’s what I could gather.  Niedner notices that, in John’s Gospel, Jesus is always in control.  This is the Gospel where Jesus says “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord.”[1]  Niedner wrote:

“Jesus promised, and then he acts that way. He heads for Jerusalem…

he stopped along the way in Bethany to pick up his dead friend Lazarus. He needed him, so he had to raise him first, then have him unwrapped so he could come along to Jerusalem, and sure enough, the powers that be see they have to kill Lazarus, too.

“Then we watch as Jesus finds his own donkey. He turns himself in at Gethsemane and from then on, everyone from Judas to Pilate obeys his every order. He takes over every trial scene, carries his own cross, and dies crying, “It worked!” Which is really John’s way of asserting that Rome and the other rulers of this world aren’t in charge. It’s God’s world, and in our living as well as our dying, we’re part of something far bigger than they—or even we—can imagine.”[2]

And Fred Niedner found in John’s Gospel an elegant storyline with the woman at the well in Samaria:

“John the Baptist calls himself the best man to the bridegroom Jesus, and immediately thereafter Jesus finds himself with a noontime thirst at Jacob’s well in Samaria. Right on cue, a woman appears, and Jesus asks for a drink. We know this scene, for we have witnessed there the betrothals of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah, even Ruth and Boaz. This time, however, the prospective bride has survived five previous marriages and an unspecified sixth relationship. Jesus joins her family for the requisite hospitality, but he leaves the well without a drink and the village without a wife.”[3]

Remember the beginning of John’s Gospel—do you remember the very first of Jesus’s signs?  It’s the Wedding at Cana story, where Jesus turns water into wine.  They’re at a wedding, but the bride nor bridegroom are never mentioned.  Then there’s Jesus with the woman at the well, possibly making a marriage proposal, but never getting the drink he asked for. 

Until he is on the cross—when Jesus says “I’m thirsty.”  That’s when he gets a drink.

As Jesus dies, he says, “It is finished,” meaning the engagement is complete, time to celebrate.  Or in Fred Niedner’s terms, Jesus is saying, “It worked!”  Meaning God’s involvement with us humans on earth—Jesus has taken humanity like a spouse.  That’s the depth of relationship that God is seeking.

Niedner also preached this in a sermon:

“How many of our prayers, if we really think about them, aren’t really pleas that God would keep us from dying. “Keep us safe,” we pray. “Heal us of our diseases. Give us food. Make peace in our world.” Every one of them really means, “Keep us, or at least our children, from dying.” And when one of us dies, especially a younger one struck down suddenly or tragically, we hear ourselves asking, “Lord, where were you? Where are you? Lord, if you had been here, our brother, our sister, would not have died.”

“And think how much of what we do has the same theme. I think of my health plan and the other money I spend on medical care. I think of my constant dieting, my exercise plan. I think of how I teach and watch over the safety of my children. I think of the causes I support that have to do with drunk drivers and cystic fibrosis and cancer.

“I’m working on one thing—to keep from dying. That’s what we’re up to in this world, isn’t it? Survival. We spend our lives trying to keep from dying.

Which makes for a couple sad things. For one, we are so busy keeping from dying that many of us never get around to living. And there’s a difference between the two.

“Living, real living, is full of risks and vulnerability and giving things away just for the joy of it. Keeping from dying has room for very little of those things. Those are often rather sure ways to die, you know.

“Second, if all we need God for is to keep us from dying, we’ve got a pretty small relationship with God. God is merely the administrator of our health care plan, not our partner in the dream of what the world could be, not our friend in the dance of life’s uncertainties and surprises. And that’s what God wants to be for us.”[4]

Imagine, a God who is about more than survival.  And the idea of church—all of us—as the bride of Christ, now feels less cringey and more love story.  Imagine, God as our partner in the dream of what the world could be. 

Amen.  

Pastor Cheryl

[1] John 10:18

[2] From an address by Fred Niedner at the closing of the Lutheran School of Theology, November 3, 2024; sourced at https://crossings.org/thursday-theology-faithful-endings-part-two/ on April 7, 2026.

[3] Niedner, Frederick A., The Mystery of Marriage: Secrets of Joined Lives, The Christian Century, July 8, 2015 issue, sourced at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2015-06/mystery-marriage on April 7, 2026.

[4] Sermon by Frederick Niedner, “Called With Lazarus to a New Dying and a New Life,” dated March 9, 2008, in Immanuel, Michigan City, Indiana; quoted by Josh Messner in a web post on April 2, 2021; sourced at https://elmensemble.org/called-with-lazarus-to-a-new-dying-and-a-new-life%E2%80%A8/