Sermon for Good Friday
admin | 22 April 2011“What mean ye by this service?”
This has been the question that has framed our Holy Week meditations. It reaches its climax in this service on this day which we are privileged to call Good Friday. Christ is crucified. Christ is dead. What, indeed, do we mean by this service?
Simply put, we behold him who we have pierced, as Zechariah prophesied and as we hear at the end of the Passion according to John. We behold Christ Crucified and dead on the Cross. That is the most basic answer to the question. But like so many questions, it only opens us out to more and more questions. Why is Christ crucified? What does it mean? Who crucified Christ? The questions are as disturbing as the answers.
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” So goes the old spiritual. The question is not merely rhetorical. Of course, in a literal sense we weren’t there. The crucifixion was long ago and far away. And yet, in a metaphorical sense, the sense of the hymn itself, and theologically, we are there. And even more, we are they who crucified our Lord.
That is part and parcel of the deeper meaning of this Good Friday service and, indeed, of Holy Week itself. We have no one else to blame for Christ Crucified but ourselves. Not the Jews, not the Romans, not some conspirators’ plot to pull a fast one on the gullible, not some Gnostic nonsense about a body switch or an elaborate act of deception. No. The whole point of Holy Week and, especially, Good Friday is that we have to take ownership for the crucifixion.
Oh, I know, it sounds like a heavy guilt trip. Clergy and Church trying to make people feel bad in order to milk them of their wealth. All a kind of power trip. But no. None of that really works or makes any real sense of what we have been given to see in the pageant of Holy Week. It is not, I think, really all that difficult to see ourselves in this story. It is not, I think, really all that difficult to take note of the ugliness and the vanity of our sins and follies. It is not, I think, really all that hard to see how fickle and fey our hearts can be.
We can, at the very least, I hope, recognize the potentiality in our own souls for most, if not all, of the hideous spectacles of human behavior on display in the story of the Crucified Christ. It is, simply put, about the total parade of human sin. All of it, past, present and future, is embraced in the spectacle of the Crucified. That is why Paul can say that “he hath made him [to be] sin for us, who knew no sin.” Christ, the sinless one, was made sin for us. The whole and complete packet of sin is made visible on the Cross. It is what we do. We have done our worse. And all is done. We have had our way with God in Christ. He hangs dead on the Cross.
“What makes this rage and spite?” So asks Samuel Crossman in his poignant hymn, “My Song is Love Unknown,” set to a wonderful melody in John Ireland’s tune “Love Unknown.” The hymn captures the meaning of our service. We confront the hideous spectacle of ourselves. But, even more, we behold the awesome love of God for us in the figure of Christ Crucified. What is meant to be awakened in us is an understanding, or at least the glimpse of an understanding, of that love unknown.
Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King,
Never was grief like thine.
This is my Friend,
In whose sweet praise
I all my days
Could gladly spend.
The solemn liturgy of Good Friday places us with Christ in his death for us. The service is meant to convict us and to convince us. The “two vast and spacious things,” as George Herbert puts it, are “sin and love” and “yet few there are that sound them,” meaning measure or know them. Both are completely on display in Holy Week and, most especially, in the spectacle of Good Friday. It belongs to the meaning of this service for us to sound them. For if we can behold him crucified and know his love, then, this is truly Good Friday. For it means that we can behold our sins in him and know in Christ Crucified the power of the forgiveness of sins.
Forgiveness and reconciliation belong to the meaning of this service. Christ’s death is our forgiveness. Christ’s death reconciles us to God. God looks at us and sees his Son. That is our salvation. But it can only happen if we, too, are looking at Christ Crucified.
To behold the Crucified is to be in sorrow for our sins which crucify him. But even more, it is to discover the divine love that conquers sin and death. There lies the possibility of our sorrows being turned into joy.
And in a way, the motions of the Resurrection already begin to happen. Out of the side of the dead and crucified Christ flow water and blood. They will become the signs and symbols of the Sacraments of the Church, the forms of our life-giving participation in the salvation which God seeks for us while we were yet sinners. “What mean ye by this service?” is our participation in the divine work of human redemption. To look on him whom we have pierced is to begin to learn “what mean ye by this service.”
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2011