Sermon for Good Friday
admin | 30 March 2018“Be it unto me according to thy word”
But which word? There are seven after all, the seven last words of Christ from the cross, words which define us in relation to God in Christ.
On Good Friday we contemplate Christ crucified. Through the Passion accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke we have pondered something of the mystery of the crucifixion that brings us to this moment itself as seen through the eyes of John. All four Gospels contribute to our remembering the Passion.
Such remembering is absolutely central to Christian Faith and Christian life. Why? Because comfort, our consolation and blessedness, is entirely found in the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice and suffering for us. Good Friday means that it is good for us to behold the one whom we have pierced, to draw upon the passage from Zechariah that John himself uses. “They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” For “they” read “we. “
To what benefit? What good is there for us in looking upon the crucified? To behold ourselves in our sins and wickedness is a great and necessary good. Our sins are the immediate cause of his Passion. But there is something more. The good for us is to behold the love of God in Christ crucified. No symbol, no sign is more powerful, more effective really than this at signifying the divine love for our humanity precisely in the horrifying spectacle of our humanity’s attempt to annihilate God from the horizon of our lives. The deep meaning of Good Friday is that we kill God. God is dead, dead in the crucified Christ, the one who is God and man. He has “borrowed a body that he might borrow a death” (Athanasius); our body, our death. But he is God made man. In Christ, God dies for us.
There can be no greater good, no greater paradox than the overcoming of our deaths by the death of Christ. What does it mean? It is the death of death. On Good Friday we behold death as the consequence and meaning of human sin and wickedness. We behold what our rage and spite accomplishes – death. We see exactly what happens when we are left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We see our nothingness. This and this alone is the great good of Good Friday because only so can we see the greater goodness of God.
We can only call this day Good Friday if we begin to get this point, the point that only God can bring good out of evil. Our good on Good Friday, however much we assume the Resurrection, is to behold the death of God in the Crucified, pure and simple. What we see is our evil writ large but we see that as willingly borne in the body of the crucified. Our sins are made objective to us. This is the take-away point here, a point illustrated wonderfully in John’s Gospel. “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me” (John 12.32), a passage which in turn looks back to where Jesus recalls an important image from The Book of Numbers. “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3. 14,15).
What is the reference? It has to do with the journey of the Hebrews in the wilderness of Sinai under the leadership of Moses. That is a journey of learning, learning how to be the people of God as defined by the Law of God and learning how to live from what God provides. Not easy lessons. True to form, “the people became impatient on the way … and spoke against God and against Moses.” There you have it in a nutshell.
In speaking against God, we are calling God not good but evil. Good Friday compels us to contemplate these contradictions within ourselves by seeing them made objective in Christ crucified. In The Book of Numbers, the people whine and complain, “why have you brought us up out of the Egypt to die in the wilderness?” They unleash a battery of complaints that are really based on the assumption that God exists for us and for our sense of what is good. Do for us, God, what we want for us. This is not the same thing as “be it unto me according to thy word” or “not my will but thy will be done” or “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” No. This is to defy and deny the goodness of God, effectively calling good evil.
In Numbers, the divine response is tough and immediate but instructive. “Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.” This prompts an immediate about face and the people come to Moses in a kind of contrition. “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord.” They ask Moses to intercede to God for them. The Lord responds by bidding Moses make a fiery serpent out of bronze and set it upon a pole so that “every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” The point is clear. They are to look upon their sin made visible in the bronze serpent, the externalization of their sinful disobedience.
John draws upon that imagery. Christ crucified draws us to himself in a deeper understanding of our sins and its meaning. It means death. It is made visible in the death of Christ. Only in seeing that and contemplating our sins can we possibly hope to live and be healed. That is Good Friday. It is the meaning of the Comfortable Words too. Here is our “refreshment,” here is “eternal life,” here is salvation for “sinners,” and here is “the propitiation for our sins.”
Sin alienates us from God and from one another. We cannot make ourselves right with God; we can’t undo what has been done and we can do no good thing of ourselves. We can only contemplate our evil but in so doing we are being turned to the greater goodness of God. He makes it possible for us to behold him crucified. That is the greatest good of this day, Good Friday. Look and be saved. How? By being convicted of our sins and foolishness. He who knew no sin bears all sin. He who cannot die dies and so death itself dies. Christ’s sacrifice makes us one with God; it overcomes the self-willed separation of our sins. One of the Scriptural anthems for Good Friday recalls the last of the Comfortable Words, reminding us that “herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and send his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” It makes sin and death nothing and so we are made one again with God. “By his stripes we are healed,” as one of Isaiah’s suffering servant songs reminds us. Our sin and death die on the Cross in the Crucified. All because of God’s love of his own absolute goodness.
The radical teaching here is that Christ bears all sin past, present and future in his crucifixion and as such overcomes all sin. God in Christ allows our humanity to have its way even to the point of annihilating God. Only so can we discover the utter folly and nothingness of sin and thus the greater power and goodness of God. Only through the death of death. And so all the words of the Cross bring us to the one word which carries them all. Mary’s “be it unto me” at once anticipates and participates in Christ’s word of agony, “not my will but thine be done,” a word which belongs to the last word of the Crucified, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
The radical meaning of Holy Week is that everything is gathered into the relationship of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Everything is returned to God. Sin is the perversion of the good. In contemplating Christ Crucified we see not only sin and evil but the greater goodness of God. In bearing all sin and death, all sin and death is overcome. Such is the goodness of the love of God.
We hang upon the words of the Crucified, all the words of the Passion. Only so will be like Mary.
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Liturgy of Good Friday, 2018