Christ Church Riverdale

Good Friday 2004 Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Wisdom 2:1,12-24; John 19:1-37

Good Friday is the most somber day of the Christian year. Jesus, identified as the Son of God, dies an agonizing death on the cross for our salvation. We identify with the suffering of Jesus, and we ask with the psalmist, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” We lay our sufferings at the foot of the cross.

The Bible tells us that Jesus died after his followers had all forsaken him. He died alone, as we all will, after preparing those he loved. He gave his disciples the eucharist to remember him. In John, he speaks to his mother and to the beloved disciple. They are there with him at the cross, and he tells them to be mother and son, son and mother. But after this the disciples take her away to their homes, and Jesus is alone. In the end, he entrusts to God his spirit, and he dies.

The passion events are full of powerful human emotion. But they are more than that. On the third day, he rises and appears to his friends, and they believe that death is overcome.

This is a great mystery. In our hearts and in our souls and in our lives, we know that these events transform us. Exactly how is another thing entirely. I am uncomfortable with Good Friday preaching. In the first place, it overwhelms me. How to do justice to such a mysterious and profound event? I am unmoved by the blood and guts of it, and have always felt that sermons describing in medical detail the sufferings of Jesus are both irrelevant and distasteful. I don’t want to hear a preacher describe, in gruesome detail, the effect of each nail as it is driven into the wrists or the feet. The gospels don’t do that. The say he was scourged. They describe a crown of thorns. They say that there was blood when the spear entered. But they don’t dwell on it. Responding to a recent passion movie, Dierdre Good, a professor at the General Seminary, pointed out that the suffering and death of Jesus as presented in the gospels is neither a blood offering, as in the sacrifice of an animal, nor is it atonement for sin. Jesus suffers a death common for criminals, and he rises from the dead. The point is that the disciples are changed forever. They understand the resurrection as a sign of unearned love from God.

The church, over the ages, has struggled to understand the salvation reality, sometimes with an emphasis on the blood of Jesus and at other times with the doctrine of the atonement. In ancient Israel, on the Day of Atonement, the people of Israel put their sins on a goat driven out into the desert to die. Unlike that ritual, the death of Jesus is the death of the Son of God and it is once for all time, and not repeated yearly. Instead, we gather weekly to remember that Jesus died for our sins and to experience that forgiveness in the sacramental bread and wine.

Another image is Jesus as the Passover lamb, and we say, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed or us” after the breaking of the bread at the eucharist. We mean not that he is sacrificed each Sunday and each time we share the body and blood, but that this event becomes present for us as we recall the events of Good Friday.

I received a telephone call from the director of “The Passion of the Christ” last week. I was rather shocked to hear on the other end of the line, “This is Mel Gibson.” Well, I soon discovered that I was listening to a recording, and the recorded voice thanked me for supporting his film. I didn’t support the film and I didn’t see it, and I am uneasy with such promotion and the amount of money it is making. I want to discover that its profits will be given away to the poor, but I understand Dr. Good’s point in her article, that the questions it raises are good ones. The discussions it has spawned are helpful. For instance, she suggests that “driving the relentless shedding of blood is Gibson’s notion of the enormity of human sin and concomitant guilt.” And she notes, “For this there is never enough spilled blood.” It’s not the amount of blood or pain, but God’s presence in our suffering, that is the point.

A simple explanation of Good Friday is that it is the ultimate sign of God’s love. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son.” By this free and undeserved gift, we are saved by that love.

As to how this happens, whether by atonement or by blood sacrifice, the answer is as difficult as proving by pure logic the existence of God. We are saved by faith through grace, and God’s foolishness is greater by far than any wisdom of ours.

Today’s readings from John’s great gospel have given rise to theories over the years that Jews as a race or a people were responsible for the death of Jesus, merely because individuals who were Jewish, along with the Roman authorities and soldiers, were implicated. It would be just as logical, perhaps, to blame all Italians because of Roman involvement. The point, as Bach emphasized in his great music, and as our hymns and theology proclaim, is that all people everywhere are prone to sin, to calling evil good, and to tragic fault. From this we need desperately to be saved.

Johann Hermann, who lived from 1585-1647, expressed it in these words:

”Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus. I it was denied thee. I crucified thee.”

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