Sermon for Good Friday
“What mean ye by this service?”
It is called Good Friday? Why, we might ask? In so doing, we are really asking, “what mean ye by this service?” How is this good? The Passion of Christ reaches its fullest and inexhaustible intensity in the Crucifixion of Christ. And while we can only contemplate Christ’s Crucifixion because of the Resurrection, itself the fruit of the Passion, it is equally the case that without Good Friday, Easter has no meaning. There is a profound good that belongs to what we contemplate on this day.
We contemplate the real horror and meaning of human sin. There is lots of violence and nastiness, selfishness and self-regard, narcissism and nihilism, not to mention sheer stupidity and stubbornness, to go around in our world and day, more than we can take in and deal with, and yet this day shows us the greater evil which moves in all of the disorders of human hearts and minds since the beginning of time and even to the end of time. What is that? Simply our attempt to kill God.
That is the radical meaning of Christ’s Crucifixion. God in Christ gives himself into our hands so that we can do with him what we will. We have our way. It is not a pretty picture. Yet this is the real meaning of having our way, the real meaning of our vaunted claims to autonomy, the real meaning of all our assertions of control. It is not only destructive of one another through our domination and control of one another whether in passive aggressive ways so finely tuned or in the more brutal forms of active aggression. No. Good Friday bids us plumb the depths of satanic evil that is potential and real in all our hearts. Christ crucified shows us exactly the deep and radical meaning of sin. It is the attempt to eradicate altogether the very principle of our being and knowing and loving, the very principle of the being and knowing of all things – God. We who depend upon God for our every breath and thought and word and deed deny him and seek to annihilate him from the horizons of our minds.
It is utter folly, a delusion, a contradiction. Yet to confront this and to see this made visible before us is the only way in which we might discover the real truth and dignity of our humanity. We “look upon him whom [we] have pierced,” as our liturgy reminds us, drawing upon the words of Zechariah recalled by John. The point, as Lancelot Andrewes teaches, is that we in turn should be pierced; in other words, convicted in our consciences about the radical meaning of all sin. We pierce God. We kill God. To say that seems quite astounding but it is the deep logic of the Christian faith without which we cannot understand the radical nature of the Resurrection. What is the good of this day? It is Christ’s death. His death for us is freely embraced and endured for the sake of our being made new. And so we are broken-hearted in order to be made new.
