by CCW | 25 March 2016 21:00
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.”
And yet, we do know what we are doing. We act deliberately. Such is sin. ‘I know what I am doing and I am doing it anyway!’ Such are our thoughts, our words and our deeds. Does that mean that Jesus is wrong when he says “they know not what they do,” meaning us? No. Because our willful sinfulness obscures the clarity of our reasoning. We see but in a glass darkly. We do not know fully and completely as we should. Only after the fact do we begin to understand more fully. ‘Now I see’, we say, meaning that before we didn’t see very clearly at all.
This is why John’s account of the Passion is so critical. It helps us to see things about ourselves and about God more fully and more clearly. His Gospel shows us the most about how we are gathered into the dynamic of the Trinity, into the interpersonal life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The one thing needful is to “look upon him whom we have pierced”, John tells us by way of Zechariah. We look so that we may learn. We look so that we may be drawn up into his life with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.
The one thing needful means that there is always more for us to ponder and learn about sin and love, about ourselves and about God. To attend to the crucifixion of Christ is to see his heart broken for us in love and for our own hearts to be broken through our awareness of sin. That is why one of the mantras for Lent is the Psalmist’s great insight, “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”. For“the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit”. Only as broken can we be made whole. Good Friday gathers us into the mystery of human redemption. God and only God makes something good out of human evil.
All of the Scriptural lessons of this day emphasize that theme. There is the heart-rending story of Abraham being put to the test through his intended sacrifice of Isaac; a story which is meant to contribute to the story of the Christ’s crucifixion, to his coming “to do the will of him who sent him” even if it means, as it seems, his death and sacrifice for us. How is that something good, we might say, because we find the whole spectacle horrifying. What is horrifying is the world of human sin. That cannot be ignored but has to be faced. We have to see the utter folly, destructive and hurtful as it is of all and every form of evil, past, present and to come. It is all folly because it is nothing in itself but depends entirely upon the prior goodness of God and the goodness of everything he has made. Evil is the great parasite upon the goodness of God. Good Friday is good only because the good is greater than all and every evil. And yet its force tries us and tempts us.
There is the image of the Suffering Servant from Isaiah. The vocation of Israel to suffer for the good of others that they might learn the goodness of God is concentrated on the figure of Christ Jesus and him crucified. It is a strong testament to the essential goodness of God even in the face of hardship and suffering, something which our world and day has a hard time believing. “Who among you fears the Lord/and obeys the voice of his servant,/who walks in darkness/ and has no light,/ yet trusts in the name of the Lord/and relies upon his God?” Powerful words which open us out to the mystery of God. Ultimately, the mysteries of life and death are gathered up into the greater mystery of God. The one thing needful is for us to ponder the mystery of God which alone can teach us about sin and love, about life and death, about who we are in the sight of God.
We look upon the crucified. We listen to his words on the cross. On Good Friday, we behold him dead and only so can we begin to live. Dead on the Cross, his side is pierced by one of the soldiers and “at once there came out blood and water”. As the Fathers of the early Church observed, out of his wounded side flow the sacraments of the Church, baptism and communion. Out of Christ dead and pierced on the Cross flows his life into us. The resurrection is in the passion and we can only know it through the passion.
The last lesson of Good Friday is from John’s Gospel. It is about Christ’s body being taken by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and being placed in a tomb in a garden. A tomb in a garden. A tomb which will become the womb of new life. “Ye must be born again”, Jesus had said to Nicodemus in a passage where he had spoken about himself as being lifted up “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness”. He had spoken about spiritual matters, about thinking upward, about being born upward into the things of the spirit. It is not by accident that the Nicodemus Gospel is the Gospel for Trinity Sunday. Through the Passion and Death of Christ we are raised up into the community of the Trinity. The one thing needful is our contemplation of God whose service is perfect freedom, whose goodness is all our life and whose forgiveness is all our joy. But only through our broken hearts.
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2016
Solemn Liturgy
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