“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
Good Friday brings us to the Cross. Simply as spectators? As mere on-lookers? Is this a matter of curiosity? A spectacle? Something of passing interest? A matter indifferent?
Good Friday goes to the heart of the Christian Faith. What unfolds before us in Scripture and Liturgy on this day is utterly essential. No Good Friday, no Easter. Easter is meaningless without Good Friday. It is the tragedy of the contemporary churches to have downplayed the meaning and significance of Good Friday. So what is the real and essential good of Good Friday? That we confront the spectacle of human sin in all of its destructive force in the figure of the Crucified. The good is the love of God manifest in the terror of the Cross. The good is our sense of being utterly and completely broken-hearted because of what we do in our sins. Here is sin writ large. It is what we contemplate in the crucified Christ. We contemplate the utter folly and destructive nonsense of human sin.
What is that folly and nonsense? Our parody of God. We presume to kill God. Good Friday is the death of God because of the willingness of God in Christ to place himself in our hands. What we do is crucify him as if to annihilate God from the horizons of our minds. Such is the folly of our humanity in its disarray and disorder, in its destructive attitude to the world around us and towards one another. Good Friday challenges and counters all of the nonsense of our fallen humanity. The good of Good Friday is our being humbled and broken-hearted at the spectacle of human wickedness in the greater spectacle of divine love.
It has always been something of a shock to me about how little attention is paid to Good Friday in our Maritime world. The intensity and drama of Good Friday, as I have sometimes experienced it, included the three-hour service of preaching on the Seven Last Words as well as the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday. The second is what we have in this service. The first is practically unknown, unthinkable and unwelcome. “Look on me all ye who pass by.” Indeed. Look and pass. Unaware and unmoved by the central doctrine and teaching of the Christian faith. No wonder our churches are empty. We are insensible to the truth of this day.
Good Friday is at once a workout for our hearts and minds. It counters the middle class presumption to life as all comfort and coziness and to the more deadly assumption of ourselves as the center of everything. In that sense, Good Friday calls us to account, to reality, to the reality of sin and suffering. Even more, the real good of Good Friday is nothing less than the greater spectacle of divine love. We behold sin and love but not in equal measure. Love is the greater power that makes out of our own awareness of sin the way of love in us. This is the wonder of Good Friday that makes it already the resurrection. Such is the radical nature of love.
Good Friday challenges us because Christ challenges us from the Cross. We confront the evil of ourselves. That is the good of Good Friday and there is no point in trying to diminish that or downplay it, no point in opting for the reductive simplicities of the therapeutic culture or sociological explanations or any of the growing number of ways in which we deny our own human agency. This the great question for our age – the sense of human agency and responsibility. Good Friday calls us to account.
We are at once convicted and comforted, albeit in the proper sense of comfort, namely as being strengthened inwardly. We contemplate the full reality of Christ’s sacrifice as the spectacle of divine love. We do so only by being broken-hearted at what we do. Here is human agency at its very worst yet opening us out to human agency at its very best. The best we do today is to contemplate the one whom we have pierced. Such is the explicit logic of Good Friday. We contemplate Christ whom we have crucified.
To attempt to deny this by ignoring this day only implicates us in its meaning but without benefit to ourselves. The radical teaching of Good Friday is that the whole of our humanity is implicated in the story of sin and evil. In the Christian understanding that is captured in the Crucified and perhaps most wonderfully in the last words of Christ. They are words which not only convict us but teach us and enfold us in the teaching. And what is the teaching? The power and love of God which is greater than our hearts. Wow. That is the good of Good Friday.
The Cross reveals God making something good out of our evil. But if we are unaware of our evil, how will we appreciate the goodness of God and thus the goodness of our humanity? Our good on this day, paradoxically, is to contemplate our evil. In so doing, we will be broken-hearted. That will be our good.
Everything is gathered into the hands and heart of God to use human metaphors and images to speak of what is beyond all imagining. The words of the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father. Those words embrace us in the divine love which seeks our good precisely when we are sinners, precisely in the face of our evil. It is not just the words of the dying Christ. It is also about what flows out of the side of Christ dead on the cross. The last indignity to the Crucified leads to the greatest dignity of our humanity. An unnamed soldier “with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water” (Jn. 18.34). John immediately tells us that “he who saw it has borne witness – his testimony is true – that you also may believe” (vs. 35). He looked upon the crucified Christ, dying and dead.
The outflowing of blood and water have become a Patristic commonplace as symbolic of the sacraments of the Church, the sacraments of baptism and communion. Such is resurrection – the greater power of life in the midst of death, we might say. Such is the real dignity of our humanity in our participation in God’s love outpoured on Good Friday. The point is that we can only contemplate the Cross in the light of the Resurrection. But it is the contemplation of the Passion in all of its intensity that belongs to the truth and meaning of the Resurrection without which it is, for all intents and purposes, utterly meaningless. We are the broken-hearted. It is only in knowing that we broken spirits that we can live to God. Such is the good of Good Friday.
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2021