by CCW | 2 April 2010 23:00
Is it over yet? Perhaps I shouldn’t ask. But here is John’s last word from the Cross which says, “it is finished.” And yet we do more, you and I. After Christ dies, there is one final act of outrage, it seems, yet one more act. It belongs to our good on this day we call Good Friday to contemplate the ‘something more’ of our sinfulness and the even greater ‘something more’ of God’s love.
The dead Christ, having given up his spirit, still hangs upon the Cross; no longer dying but dead. The dead Christ is, then, pierced by the soldier’s spear. We have more to do, it seems, than just crucify him. We have more to do than just to kill him. It is, of course, perhaps, the customary procedure or test to see if he is dead but is it not also yet another gratuitous act of violence?
Yet God has far, far more than the more of our sins, something far, far more than the acts of our violence. And it begins here in this word of consummation, this word of finishing and ending. The great blessing of the Resurrection, Christ’s grand finale, we might say, already begins to flow out from the body of the broken-hearted Christ. Water and blood come forth from that stricken rock. It is the teaching of the Fathers that the sacraments of the Church flow out of the pierced side of the Crucified. Water and blood, the symbols of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist, flow out of the side of Christ crucified. There is at once the ‘something more’ of our sins – a final and unnecessary act, a violation of the sacred body – and the ‘something more’ of the act of God whose nature it is always to make something out of nothing. Creation and Recreation.
But Christ, alive in the death of the Cross, has cried out, “It is finished.” We are not finished, it seems, but what is completed on the Cross is all that belongs unto righteousness, to the setting right of our wounded and broken humanity. This word signals the fulfillment of all that belongs to the restoration of the relationship between man and God. All that comes after this all-sufficient sacrifice of the Cross, all that flows out into the life of the Church and the world, we might say, is ‘something more’. There is more of the same, same old wickedness on our part, on the one hand, and, there is, on his part, on the other hand, more that is the grace of new life, the new and greater creation that is the Resurrection. Not just ‘something more’ for us but also ‘something more’ to be realised within us, then, the ‘something more’ of lives transformed by the grace of Christ. It signals our living more and more in his finishing work. Yet only because of what flows out from the side of the dead Christ pierced on the Cross.
In this ‘final’ word, Christ, the Word and Son of the Father, gathers up all the prophecies of Scripture into their ultimate fulfillment. He utters the sense of his purpose accomplished, his task completed, his work perfected. He utters this sense of fullness in the midst of this empty barrenness, illustrated in this barren sanctuary.
The purpose of the Word written is completed in the Word uttered in the flesh. Christ’s cry is not the voice of the dead end of “no exit,” (apologies to Sartre) but the final expression of purpose accomplished. He has “come to the will of him who sent him.” What more should we do? Only to will what he has willed for us and so to let his will have its finishing in us.
We are, as Luther puts it, simul justus et peccator, at once justified and a sinner. The point is wonderfully captured and expanded upon in John Donne’s poem entitled “A Hymn to God the Father.” Everything that we ever do in our sinfulness is embraced in the ‘something more’ of divine forgiveness which is always greater than our sins and follies. The divine forgiveness is accomplished and concluded, in the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ; it is finished and ended on the Cross. And so it is done.
I. Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For, I have more.
II. Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
III. I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday
Solemn Liturgy 2010
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/04/02/sermon-for-good-friday-2/
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