A sermon for Good Friday:
Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25; John 18:1-19:42
My teacher and later colleague Tony Lewis once talked to our class about the “holy incomprehensibility” of the liturgy.
He didn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t understand the words of these ancient prayers. I think he meant that the density of them is part of the point.
The Wisdom of Sirach says of God “We could say more but we could never say enough,” and sometimes it feels like the people who wrote the collects decided to try anyway. Many of our prayers sort of burst over with meaning, the ever-flowing-stream of them contributing to the sense of mystery and majesty.
Here’s one of the so-called Solemn Collects that we’ll pray later in the service:
Gracious God, the comfort of all who sorrow, the strength of all who suffer: Let the cry of those in misery and need come to you, that they may find your mercy present with them in all their afflictions; and give us, we pray, the strength to serve them for the sake of him who suffered for us, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Probably not the most grammatically complex collect, but not one I’d want to read cold.
Or here’s the one that kicks off the season of Lent on Ash Wednesday:
Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make [really?!] in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
It’s easy enough for our ears to get calibrated to subclauses on subclauses, and, in this season, to a thoroughly Lenten focus on our wretched tendency to separate ourselves from God and one another.
And so it shocks me anew each year when the dramatic and often overwhelming Good Friday liturgy begins with these simple words:
Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross
It’s uncharacteristically simple, and the “ask” is easy to miss: Behold us. Behold your family.
That may be because the bigger ask, the more urgent and weighty petition, comes at the end of the Good Friday service:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.
This is the day when we bear witness to the lengths Jesus was willing to go to in order to disclose God’s love to us, the day when he fulfilled the prophecy that matters most: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
See us, we pray. And then regardless of what you have seen, draw us near—in the very arms of your saving embrace.
For all the dangers of John’s Gospel and especially its Passion—and especially today we cannot ignore the danger of turning Jewish people then or now into the very kinds of scapegoats that the Jewish and Gentile leaders made Jesus out to be—for all the dangers of John’s Gospel, its great and abiding gift is to show us this: that God in Christ feely chose to walk this path.
He carried his own Cross along the way to Golgotha, John tells us.
His defense before the authorities was nothing but transparency: “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple … I have said nothing in secret.”
Jesus chooses to stand in solidarity: to take on the human condition, to consort with all sorts and conditions, and then on Good Friday to stand—arms outstretched, voice clear and strong, below the words that Pilot has written both in mockery and as a show of what he believes to be true power—he chooses to stand there reigning from the Cross: “born for this, he meets his passion / this the Savior freely willed.”
He is precisely not “a lamb to the slaughter” as we commonly use that expression, a victim sweetly unaware. I think of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Christ figure Aragorn, riding out in regal dignity to the final fight he knows he will win by losing.
The more Jesus is mistreated, the more his testimony proves true. The more Jesus is mistreated, the wider the circle of redemption is drawn drawn.
- He accepts betrayal from his inner circle.
- He accepts indifference from his most zealous follower.
- He accepts brutality at the hands of law enforcement.
- He accepts manipulation by the leaders of an occupied people trying to consolidate their tenuous authority.
- He accepts murder at the hands of an empire too besotted by its own power to remember its genesis and genius was power of the people, not power over them.
As he accepts the mistreatment, he embraces the perpetrators—not, I think, as an example for us to follow, in this case, but as a part of his royal decree of solidarity. He forgives our cruelty and our moral inattention, even as he calmly attends to our suffering and brokenness. The love of God in Christ can bear all things.
And then at the last, in words whose very grammar in the Greek communicate the sense of “once for all,” the King decides his work is complete. “It is finished,” he says simply, and bows his head.
And so we bow ours as well, in awe and in gratitude, learning on this day and throughout our days to accept the holy, incomprehensible gift:
Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle;
of the mighty conflict sing;
tell the triumph of the victim,
to his cross thy tribute bring.
Jesus Christ, the world’s Redeemer
from that cross now reigns as King.
Preached Good Friday, 2019, at Trinity+St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco.
Image: “christus rex” by Megan via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)