Sermon for Good Friday
“Turn unto the Lord your God”
The idea of turning reaches a certain completeness on Good Friday. Circles within circles, we might say, a richness of turning and circling back and towards and upon the very principle of everything, God. Good Friday. It is the day of the profoundest reflection upon the most profoundest of themes, the death of God. For that is the radical meaning of Christ’s crucifixion.
God wills to embrace the disorders of our lives to the fullest and most impossible extent. It is literally beyond our imagining and utterly beyond our doing. We have the hardest time even thinking this mystery. And yet, year after year there is the marvel and wonder, the marvel and wonder of our turning and contemplating Christ crucified. And yet that turning is altogether about God’s turning to us.
That is the real strength and virtue of the liturgies of Good Friday. The good of this day lies entirely in the turning of Christ to us in the seven last words of the Cross. And yet, it seems we do not have the stamina to stop and pause, to think and ponder the great mystery of the crucifixion. The paradox is great if not obvious. It is all about the turning and about our turning away. Christ’s words capture the real meaning of the idea of God’s turning to us and our turning to God in repentance. The paradox is heightened even more because there is our turning in violence and abuse, in short our turning against God in the very events of the crucifixion. The point cannot be stressed enough. We are those who cry out “crucify, crucify.” We confront the hideous horror of our sins. It will not do to try and sanitize our evil, the very thing our culture in its delusions constantly does, outsourcing evil, as it were, conveniently excusing ourselves.
The point of Holy Week and especially Good Friday, without which the idea of Good Friday is meaningless, is for us to confront the radical evil of our own hearts. The evil is not out there; it is in here, in us, in you and me. So there is a turning to ourselves through our turning to Christ. In the crucified Christ we confront the hideous spectacle of our own betrayals of truth, our betrayals of God. But even more, we confront the radical meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. It is the fullest expression of his turning to us to save and redeem. The radical meaning of the turning is love, a love that is a constant circling around the principle which defines our being, the being of all reality.
