Sermon for Good Friday
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
But which word? There are seven after all, the seven last words of Christ from the cross, words which define us in relation to God in Christ.
On Good Friday we contemplate Christ crucified. Through the Passion accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke we have pondered something of the mystery of the crucifixion that brings us to this moment itself as seen through the eyes of John. All four Gospels contribute to our remembering the Passion.
Such remembering is absolutely central to Christian Faith and Christian life. Why? Because comfort, our consolation and blessedness, is entirely found in the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice and suffering for us. Good Friday means that it is good for us to behold the one whom we have pierced, to draw upon the passage from Zechariah that John himself uses. “They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” For “they” read “we. “
To what benefit? What good is there for us in looking upon the crucified? To behold ourselves in our sins and wickedness is a great and necessary good. Our sins are the immediate cause of his Passion. But there is something more. The good for us is to behold the love of God in Christ crucified. No symbol, no sign is more powerful, more effective really than this at signifying the divine love for our humanity precisely in the horrifying spectacle of our humanity’s attempt to annihilate God from the horizon of our lives. The deep meaning of Good Friday is that we kill God. God is dead, dead in the crucified Christ, the one who is God and man. He has “borrowed a body that he might borrow a death” (Athanasius); our body, our death. But he is God made man. In Christ, God dies for us.
There can be no greater good, no greater paradox than the overcoming of our deaths by the death of Christ. What does it mean? It is the death of death. On Good Friday we behold death as the consequence and meaning of human sin and wickedness. We behold what our rage and spite accomplishes – death. We see exactly what happens when we are left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We see our nothingness. This and this alone is the great good of Good Friday because only so can we see the greater goodness of God.
