Sermon for Good Friday, 7:00pm Solemn Liturgy
“One thing is needful”
The first last work of Christ in the cross is “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” as we had opportunity to consider earlier today. It is a powerful word about the nature of forgiveness. Forgiveness does not ignore sin and judgement. It just doesn’t stop there because it shows us something of the infinite goodness of God even in the face of sin and evil. John, especially on Good Friday, helps us to see this in two ways.
First, there is the powerful story of the woman taken in adultery. She is hauled before Jesus as a way of putting him to the test about the strictures of the law which mandated the stoning of adulterers, a sad reality even in our own day, it seems. “Jesus,” John tells us, “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” It is the only time in the gospels that we are told Jesus wrote something. But we do not know what he wrote. We only know what John says he said. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” The accusers “convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last.” There is only Jesus and the woman left. “When he lifted up himself … he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee? To which she replied, “No man, Lord.” Jesus said to her ‘Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more’”.
It convicts us at once of our judgements against one another and of the greater goodness of God which is there for us to live in again and again and always. “Go and sin no more”, Jesus says to her. There is more than the folly of our sins. Christ crucified convicts us of our folly but seeks our good. Christ crucified is the book of love written for us to read. Only as convicted in our own conscience can we learn the power of forgiveness. It means new life.
Secondly, there is the story of Peter’s threefold denial of Christ told in all of the Gospels. John shows us the deeper meaning of forgiveness in the way in which he restores Peter. In the third of the resurrection appearances to the disciples, Jesus asks Simon Peter three times, “Simon, son of John, lovest thou me…?” Each time he commands him to feed and tend his lambs and his sheep. Something good is made out of our sin and folly, even out of our ignorance. The tenderest and yet the most convicting word of the cross is “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
