Good Friday 2009

By my count this is probably my 12th Good Friday sermon. Every time I wonder if there is really anything to say. There’s no art that could tell the story of this day, with any more meaning or drama than the way God tells it to us. And while people have spun great webs of theological speculation about how it all works, it’s really not that hard to understand and apply the fundamental point. Jesus died, because of people like us, for people like us.

In one church I attended as a student, the priest would come into the church at the beginning of the Good Friday service, and just lie flat on the floor in front of the bare altar for a while. He said it was a reminder to him, if to no one else, that nothing we say or do in our worship bears any comparison to what God says and does - on this day above all.

The stripped-down starkness of the church sends the same message: beautifying the sanctuary is all very well, but it can’t obscure what can be the only focus today - and that’s something that’s not beautiful for all that we call it “Good” Friday. “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” [Isaiah 53:2] That’s not what this is about.

What gets our attention today is not some great theological argument or some wonderful artistic display. It’s not even a powerful story. It’s much more personal and immediate. What gets under our skin about this day is that someone hurt, and died. We have all the expected reactions when we see that. We want to turn away from it and look somewhere else (denial). We want to make sense of it, we want to make stories and theologies that allow us to say what value this death had (bargaining). If we overcome our avoidance instinct and look closely for long enough, we come to hate what happened - directing that hate either at the horror of human inhumanity that led to the Cross, or maybe even the God who allows such things to be - or both (anger).

It takes a long time for that rage to subside and to get to a point where we can actually say, we accept. We accept that Jesus died, because of people like us, for people like us. We accept that there are no words that can make sense of what that means. We accept that the only thing left to us is to turn and face the cross. We accept that dying is part of that story that the whole Bible tells, the story of God’s way with the world, with us.

Accepting all this means not hurrying on to the next big thing. If we’re really focused on the cross, we’ll understand that there is no “next big thing”. This is it. The idea of resurrection, life beyond death, is at this point in our story more a temptation than a promise. It’s a temptation to turn Jesus’ death into nothing more than a means to an end, a brief stop on the road to Easter. That’s just one more version of denial, and it pulls the punch from what’s really going on here. Neither Jesus nor his followers saw his death on the cross as something temporary, less than real. It’s meaning comes from its finality.

Of all the gospel-writers, John gets that, and shows it to us the most clearly. In the gospel of John, the triumph of Jesus comes not as he bursts out of the tomb, but as he gives his life and spirit over to God in dying. He says, “It is finished.” And that doesn’t mean, it’s over, my life is stopping. It means, I’ve done it. It means, I’ve lived my life, it’s complete, now I can lay it down. “It is finished” is a victory cry, the kind a marathon runner might make as he or she collapses at the finish line. Its meaning comes from its finality - you can only celebrate that kind of victory when you’re truly at the end.

Watching Jesus come to the end like that is the beginning of the world shifting under our feet. It throws into question one of our most fundamental assumptions. For us, the end of life always means loss and defeat - that’s why we shy away from even thinking about it. How would it change the way we live, if our aim was to die saying “It is finished” - if our goal was victory rather than defeat?

As the earth shakes under the weight of Good Friday, a crack starts to open up. A crack in the wall we create that allows us to define our own existence, our own lives, our own meaning. The light coming through that crack shows us a new perspective - it shows us that the path to victory, or completeness, lies in exactly the opposite direction that we thought. Not in the direction of getting all our ducks in a row, knowing what we want and going for it. Instead, accepting the life that God is always aiming to give us - the life that John’s Gospel calls “eternal”.

That kind of life is a Good Friday life. It involves constantly allowing our instincts for self-direction and even self-preservation to be extinguished. In the kind of life that Jesus lived and triumphantly completed, God is in charge - not me - all the time and in every way. Ironically, we think of that as “dying to self” when what it is really about is “living to God” - Jesus himself nailed that paradox when he said, “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and… the gospel, will save it” [Mark 8:35]

Perhaps when we get to this point we see the real despair of Good Friday. We know that the way is now open for us to live life in the light of God, the kind of life that ends in triumph and completion. But as every day passes we are also aware of all the ways we’re not living like that. We are still the kind of people because of whom Jesus died.

But that means we are also still the kind of people for whom Jesus died. God, in Christ, both judges and forgives us, condemns us and saves us. But in God’s heart, one of those purposes infinitely outweighs the other. “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” [John 3:17]

To say that is to risk leaping past the judgment to the forgiveness, just as we are tempted to leap past Good Friday to Easter. That’s cheap grace, which in the end is no grace at all. The real grace of God allows us to linger here a while, to feel the burden of the Cross, and to allow it to weigh us down. In this time of acceptance, by God’s grace we can feel the sadness and despair and emptiness that comes when we face our hardest truths. But as in any time of grief, that emptiness is the space where something new can happen. It is the space where God’s forgiveness can create new life. We can’t do it, so for now we simply watch, and wait.