Good Friday sermon

Good Friday Sermon
April 10, 2009-04-08
(NB: with help from Barbara Brown Taylor – The Perfect Mirror)


It is finished.

The table – the altar – is clear. The font is empty. There are no banners on the wall. No joyous acclamation or proclamation today.

It is finished. Peter weeps out by the city wall. The women wail at the tomb. The rest of the crowd sits in stunned silence; the two pieces of the curtain in the Temple sway in the afternoon breeze. Judas runs, hangs himself. One final fatality in this long drama.

There are thousands of ways in which we tell this story – some in glorious detail, every lash of the whip sounded out; every groan of pain endlessly detailed. Some paint pictures, or sculpt representations. According to John, the story centered around a melding of religion and politics. Pilate and the chief priests who remained enemies while collaborating to rid themselves of a perplexing problem, while Jesus stood at the centre like a mirror in which all around saw themselves for who they really were.

To see ourselves for who we really are – exposed, bared down past the bone until our souls are shown in their own slimy reality. Our own pride – in our accomplishments, in our judgements, in our own opinions. When we see where our trust really lies – not in the Son of God – but in money, and power, and politics. Jesus hangs on the tree, and we congratulate ourselves that we exercised our own common sense to avoid the same fate.

So often when we tell this story we try to view like it’s playing out on a TV screen. We sit back and relax, try to remain impassive while our hero dies gloriously. We like it like that – cold, sterile – because we resist getting involved in the story. We like our boundaries.

But the truth of the matter is, no matter how hard we try to keep ourselves out of the story, we’re right in the thick of it. We could be Pilate, or even a Pharisee – but the truth is we’re much worse. We’re his friends. We’re the ones who leave Jesus, deny him, let him be led away without so much as a whispered complaint.

You’ve seen it before: whenever someone famous or exceptionally well-known is in trouble, the media flock for statements from friends. And what do they do? Do they support them, or tell them that they’d seen trouble coming for some time? One of the worst things a friend can say is exactly what Peter said:
We weren’t friends, exactly. Acquaintances might be a better word. Actually, we just worked together…I don’t really know him at all.

How many times do we repeat that in our own lives, when we step aside from support or responsibility, and instead say:
- It’s a terrible tragedy, but they brought it on themselves.
- I never supported that idea, and it failed just like I said it would
- Why bother getting involved?

And then, we say, it is finished - but not in the same manner of Jesus’ declaration from the cross. Instead we, like Pilate, want to wash our hands of the whole affair and any complicity we may have in it. Rather than risk our selves we stand back and stand by and let someone else suffer.

Feeling powerless to stop a tragedy without involving ourselves, we stand alongside the assembled throng and watch as the One we proclaimed the Christ is crucified on a barren hill outside Jerusalem. We are stunned as we realize that only hours ago we stood in the courtyard and called for his death, desperately afraid that at any moment we would be unmasked as his followers. We are breathless at the scope of our own denial of Christ – the realization that our trust has rested not upon God, but upon the power that we sought and aspired to in our world.

And even though we are aware of our complicity, though we may deride ourselves for it, we daily remain with the crowd crying out for his death because we cannot stand to be naked; to be exposed in the light of Truth, to have our own motivations and thoughts thrust into our sight where we cannot hide them any longer. We find it easier to turn away from the cross, to ignore what goes on around us, than to turn to Christ. We find it easier to place faith in ideas, concepts, and wordly powers than in Jesus Christ.

One thing that we can say is ‘true’ about the Apostle John’s story, it’s that Jesus was not betrayed, tried, and killed by atheism or anarchy. He was killed by good, old-fashioned common sense. Powers of the world -- law and order allied with religion -- always a deadly mix.

If there’s a point that we need to let pierce us through from St John’s Gospel, it’s to beware of those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Or worse, beware of those people who claim they don’t need God to know they’re right, or righteous. Beware of those who cannot tell God’s will from their own, when ‘common sense’ indicates that it’s better to let one person die than risk upsetting the status quo.

In the mirror of truth – perfect truth, as Christ is revealed to be – we are responsible for the death of Christ and we keep contributing to that crucifixion in our own lives.

I remember Barbara Taylor’s insight, that what happened then keeps happening now. Where the integrity of Christ, who stood silent before his accusers, is present, our own ego and pretentiousness is exposed. In the presence of his constancy – his willingness to stay the course even though he knew at the end of it was his own agony and death – our cowardice is shown to us. In the presence of Christ’s great self-giving and self-emptying love our own hardened hearts are revealed.

But take Christ out of the room, then – send him away to death – then all those things become relative. I am no worse than you; nor you than I. But leave Jesus in the room and we’ve no place to hide, because he’s the light of the world.

In his presence, people either fall down and worship him, or do whatever they can to extinguish his light. And we almost always choose to live in shadows.

Because you see, a cross and nails are not always necessary. There are a thousand ways to kill him – some are obvious, like choosing to stand on the side of the strong while the weak struggle and die. Other ways are more insidious, as we keep our mouths shut when someone asks if we know him.

The grim agony of Good Friday for us – Good Friday, as we celebrate that someone; no, GOD - died a bloody and agonizing death for our own sin – is that for once we cannot turn away. Today we must force ourselves to look in the mirror. Today, we bring out our shame in the face of his humanity. Today, if we finally stop lying to ourselves we cannot shut our eyes and pretend we can’t see as we are revealed in the light of the sacrifice on the cross..

A light that shines in the darkness. A light that shine in our darkness, and even our darkness cannot overcome it.

Martin Luther wrote that the life of a Christian should begin by every day rising again with Christ, only to die again. An endless cycle, our lives lived in the rhythm of him who claimed to be the Resurrection and the life. It means daily exposing ourselves to the spit, to the shame, to the suffering of life even as our Saviour did – and then realizing that truly, this man was the Son of God.

When we reach that point, that point where we have nothing left to pretend to be concerned about, nothing left to waste time worrying about -- then we’re finally ready to understand what Christ means when he says “my yoke is easy.” Then, we’re finally able to take upon ourselves the burden of being ‘Christian’ and stand at the cross without pretensions, without ego, without power, willing to die.

Because it has to be better to bear the yoke of Christ and mark of Christian – even if it means dying to all else that we thought important in this world; even to all things that we strive for in this world – than to die surrounded by the empty riches and sickening mirage of a world where seeking money is better than loving God. If we do not place our entire hope in Christ, then we are not Christian and stand condemned alongside him on crosses of our own.

Only in Christ do we find hope. As he has been lifted up, let us lay our burdens down and let our selves die with him -- to live, and to love, and to serve.

It is finished. The work of salvation, of our redemption, is complete. Our work, the work of faith, the labour of the Gospel, is just beginning. In the midst of this darkness of frailty, mortality, and death we sense the light that tugs at the edges of darkness. In that light, we slowly begin to see ourselves as Christ sees us, not as consumers in an economy but rather as true Christians, as contributors to the work of the kingdom of God.

Here, revealed as naked in heart as our ancestors in the Garden, the darkness we so prefer gives way to something glorious. Timidly, we wait, straining to see the first slim fingers of a new day, a new creation. For us here at the foot of the cross, at the closed and silent tomb- for us here, who stand forgiven -- it’s almost dawn.