Sermon for Good Friday
“All the people hung upon his words”
Never more so and never with more intensity of attention than on Good Friday. We hang upon the words of the crucified whom we behold pierced and dying on the Cross. We look and listen. There is literally nothing else for us to do and yet it is the defining challenge for us.
Guarda e ascolta, Dante the poet has Mathilda, the handmaid to Beatrice, say to him in the earthly paradise of the Purgatorio, itself one of the greatest images of the spiritual pilgrimage in which we are made “pure and prepared to leap up to the skies,” to the Paradise of God, the celestial paradise. “Look and listen,” she bids the pilgrim Dante. Look and listen to what? To the symbolic pageant of Word and Sacrament. At its center is a gryphon, a mythical creature at once wholly eagle and wholly lion, thus symbolic of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ.
Good Friday brings us to the Cross. In Dante’s great vision all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures and all the books of the Christian New Testament converge and unite in Christ. All the words of the scriptures are the words of Christ and all those words converge in the figure of the crucified. We look upon him and listen to him who looks upon us and speaks to us. Sin and love meet in the crucified. Look and listen.
Our holy week pageant brings us to the Passion according to St. John and so to the completion and contemplation of the seven last words of Christ. Matthew and Mark have given us the one word of dereliction and desolation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, the word which derives from Psalm 22. Luke as we saw on Maundy Thursday gives us three words from the Cross; the first, second and seventh word. John gives us the third, fifth and sixth words of Christ. In the seven last words of Christ there is a kind of gathering up of the fullness of revelation, a concentration of Word and Sacrament.
Looking upon the crucified means listening to the words of the crucified. We are, as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, meant to look upon the piercèd Christ whom we have pierced in our sins and follies and be pierced in our hearts and souls; in short to be moved to contrition for our sins by the spectacle of love. The Good Friday devotions on the crucified Christ has been a part of our looking and listening, an essential feature of the life of the Church from the earliest times. “My Eros is Crucified,” as Ignatius of Antioch put it, to take but one example along with a host of Patristic, Medieval and Reformed homilies on the Passion of Christ, all following the idea as Paul states, that “we preach Christ crucified.”
In some places, and this has been a large part of my own experience, that meant a three hour service structured around the preaching on the seven last words of Christ, a serious and significant devotional practice which seems to have fallen into abeyance. The history of that practice is intriguing and surprising. It was actually developed by a Peruvian Jesuit priest in the late seventeenth century and in Peru following a series of earthquakes, especially in Lima.
