Good Friday (April 2, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Good evening. Thank you Fr. Poling for the invitation and thank you to all of you for allowing me to preach God’s Word on this holy Good Friday.

I’m of the opinion that's Maundy Thursday and Good Friday should be taken together. Chronologically, of course, they are part of the same sequence: Maundy Thursday is where Jesus most keenly prepares his followers fort he events of Good Friday. But I think there’s a deeper unifying theme that runs constantly through the events of last night and today: love. The crucifix, the image at the forefront of our minds today, is the greatest symbol of love in the whole, entire world.

The cross is a reminder that humans were made to love — but in the story of Adam and Eve at the beginning of Genesis, we see a process that occurs in each of us: we fail to love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds and our neighbors as ourselves. If we set aside our self-justifications and rationalizations for a moment, I’m sure each of us can identify ways we fall short at living out our vocation to love. I have too many to count. This is the human problem, really. The human story, while not without its bright spots due to grace, is failure after failure. In the Old Testament, we see Israel consistently going back to idolatry and social injustice, two sins that are not unconnected. In our own context, we can meditate on the 20th and 21st centuries and come up with a plethora of examples of how humans fail to love: world wars, concentration camps, racial and sexual violence, economic exploitation, genocides, terror attacks, the list goes on.

This violence, what we call sin, is corrosive. It blinds us to the truth of love. Who will save us from this body of death?

In the Suffering Servant song we read from Deutero-Isaiah this evening, we’re introduced to a figure who can break our spirals of violence. This Servant is one who is marred, beaten beyond recognition. On him, our infirmities are placed. The violence he experiences is a salve for us. In a world characterized by competition and retaliation, he does not open his mouth even though he is a victim of injustice. Somehow, in this man of sorrows Who suffers righteously, there is a possibility for us to become righteous.

But why does the servant have to suffer at all? Some might give us a rather sadistic answer that God somehow revels in this violence, that he enjoys crushing the servant. I think that’s a severe misreading of what’s going on here. The Servant is so marred because he is fully human. In a world that is dehumanized by sin, his injuries are the inevitable result of a life that is humanizing. His physical disfigurements, then, are a mirror to the disfigurements in our souls. “If you do not love,” Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe says, “you will not be alive; if you love effectively you will be killed.” The Servant suffers because he shows us a possibility for a life outside those cycles of sin and violence.

We might here think of the story of the adulterous woman, a later addition to the Gospel of John, in which the crowds want to kill the woman caught in adultery until Jesus extends love to her so that by the end of the story, the want to kill him.

He becomes a scapegoat. He doesn’t open his mouth, but he pours himself out for us, stretching out his arms on the hard wood of the cross so all might come within the reach of his saving embrace.

This sacrifice of the Suffering Servant, our Lord’s self-offering on the altar of the cross, is unique. It’s not like the sacrifices of other world religions in which a priest sacrifices an animal in hopes to appease the gods. Even the Old Testament sacrificial system was inferior to the, which points us forward to the events of Good Friday, is depicted as inferior to the sacrifice of the Son of God: “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.”

The sacrifice of our Lord is unique because in it, priest and victim are united; that which is offered is identical to he who offers. This isn’t an offering to appease the bloodlust of the gods, but is the God-Man dying for the sins of the world. Giving us his own flesh and blood.

The implications of the Suffering Servant’s sacrifice are threefold.

The first implication is that his sacrifice is sufficient. By virtue of our creation, we are wholly dependent on God — we owe him everything. By sinning, however, not only do we fail to give God what he is due, but we add to a debt that already included everything.

Could God have just erased this massive debt? Not in a way that he could still be called just.

Could God have let us languish under the infinite debt as these cycles of sin and violence continue to dehumanize the human race? Not in a waybad that he could still be called loving.

So what does he do? God assumes humanity; the God-Man become Incarnate and offers himself as the sacrifice — only God could overcome the barrier between humanity and dignity but only humanity, as the guilty party, should make the sacrifice.

So Jesus took the form of a servant, going all the way to the cross, and in so doing reveals for us a God who truly is love, a God whose property is always to have mercy.

And that leads us to our second implication which is that this sacrifice restores the relationship between God and humanity, as we heard in our Hebrews reading where St. Paul…I mean the author states, “Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” This happens, as affirmed in the Athanasian Creed “not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by taking of the Manhood into God.” What this means is that we become partakers of the divine nature, as St. Peter says. Herbert McCabe is helpful here again because he says that our baptismal identity of being “in Christ”, something we remember tomorrow at the renewal of our baptismal vows, is that our stacne before God is no Longer that of a creature before their Creator but a child before the Father.

And that brings us to a third and final implication of the Suffering Servant’s sacrifice which is that this reality of Co union with God is participatory and transformative: “let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” He goes on to list the ways this happens in the context of the Church: we hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, we provoke one another, not towards anger but towards love and good deeds, we meet together as the Church gathered around Word and Sacrament, and we encourage one another. Underlying all these is the ultimate vocation for the Christian, the fundamntal organizing principle that orders all the facets of who we are: self-sacrifice, or what New Testament scholar Dr. Michael Gorman calls co-crucifixion. How do we make the Cross present to the world around us as parents or grandparents, spouses, priests, teachers, plumbers, insurance salesmen, or whatever else we’re called to be? It might express itself differently in our varying contexts, but these are variations on the same theme: we pour ourselves out for the good of the other.

To close, I could think of nothing better than to share the words of Thomas a Kempis in The Imitation of Christ in his chapter on the High Way of the Holy Cross:

“In the Cross is salvation, in the Cross is life, in the Cross is protection against our enemies, in the Cross is infusion of heavenly sweetness, in the Cross is strength of mind, in the Cross joy of spirit, in the Cross the height of virtue, in the Cross the perfection of holiness. There is no salvation of the soul, nor hope of everlasting life, but in the Cross. Take up therefore thy Cross and follow Jesus, and thou shalt go into life everlasting. He went before, bearing His Cross, and died for thee on the Cross; that thou also mayest bear thy Cross and desire to die on the Cross. For if thou be dead with Him, thou shalt also in like manner live with Him. And if thou share His punishment, thou shalt also share His glory. Behold! In the Cross all doth consist, and in our dying there on all lieth; for there is no other way unto life, and unto true inward peace, but the way of the holy Cross, and of daily mortification. Walk where thou wilt, seek whatsoever thou wilt, thou shalt not find a higher way above, nor a safer way below, than the way of the holy Cross…The Cross therefore is always ready, and everywhere Waite the for thee. Thou canst not escape it whithersoever thou runnest; for where so ever thou goest thou carries thyself with thee, and ever shalt find thyself…Know for certain, that thou ought east to lead a dying life.”

May we heed those words as we join ourselves to that offering made by our Lord on this day. May our church communities and the Church everywhere and at all times participate in that “timeless moment.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.