Sermon for Good Friday
Good Friday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”
The first word from the Cross has provided the scriptural matrix through which we have pondered the Passion of Christ in Holy Week in all of its remarkable intensity. It brings us literally to the crux of the matter, to the Cross and Christ’s Passion and Death in all of its unvarnished power and truth. Once again, we attend to the lessons at the Offices which contribute to our understanding of the mystery of human redemption.
On Good Friday, the Old Testament readings at Matins and Vespers are from Genesis with the story of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, the promised son, and the third of the four Servant Songs from Isaiah. These readings in turn are complemented and deepened by the continuation of the readings from John’s Gospel whose Passion account is the main focus on Good Friday along with the rich theological tour de force of Hebrews about the meaning and extent of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. But our Holy Week text concentrates our thinking on the struggle to understand something of “the mystery of the man of sin,” as Hooker puts it, without which we cannot begin to comprehend the mystery of redemption and salvation. Ultimately it concerns nothing less than the deepening sense of being known and embraced in God’s eternal knowing and loving of our humanity individually and collectively in Christ.
That we know not what we do convicts us of the limitations of our finite human knowing, on the one hand, and of human pretension and folly in our fallenness, on the other hand. But even more, it signals the greater truth upon which our knowing and doing properly and truly depends; the divine knowing which is the intellectual principle without which we are nothing. The wonder and mystery of Good Friday is that it concentrates the underlying theme of God’s will and reason as bringing good out of our evil. The paradox for us is that we can only begin to grasp that through the contemplation of ourselves in our sinfulness – that is at least one part of the great good of this day called Good Friday. To do so, however, is to begin to contemplate the surpassing power of God’s truth and goodness, to see in the spectacle of Christ crucified, as Donne puts it, “this beauteous form” which alone can assure or comfort our pitiable souls, our souls in need of pity. That would mean our awareness of the need for the divine mercy and pity that Good Friday so powerfully presents. We confront ourselves in Christ’s Passion only to discover the love of God about which we have such an incomplete sense of its all-encompassing power.
