by CCW | 18 April 2025 21:00
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.
We come knowing and unknowing to behold Christ crucified and dead at our hands. Our grasp of the mystery of sin is always partial and incomplete but illuminated by the growing sense of God’s all-embracing love and knowledge. The story of the intended sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis contains the underlying theological truth of the whole journey of our souls. “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son,” Abraham says to his son Isaac. Isaac goes with his father willingly but unknowingly. He does not know that he is to be the sacrifice.
The whole scene is terrifying and challenging on several levels. Søren Kierkegaard found it quite moving and asks us to think of Isaac in the moment as well as what is being asked of Abraham, arguing that it means “the teleological suspension of the ethical”. That, it seems to me, is another way of pointing us to the divine will for our humanity which always exceeds our human understanding. Abraham in the Genesis story is being put to the test about his faithfulness to God, to be sure, for that is the point of the story, but in the most disturbing form of sacrificing not only his only son but the one who is the promised son through whom God’s promises for the blessing of the whole world are to be realized. The scene has a remarkable intensity to it.
The Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and fullness focuses on the Son who goes willingly and knowingly as the one who provides himself the sacrifice. That knowing in Christ is agony, a struggle in his very humanity, but one in which we are meant to learn the truth of our humanity in its loving acquiescence to God who wills to bring good out of our evil. This reveals the real and true meaning of the will of God in creation, especially in terms of what it really means for us to be made in the image of God. It can only be through the total self-giving love of God in our humanity. This is what we are given to see in Christ’s sacrifice. It is highlighted for us in many different ways in the Passion but, perhaps, most poignantly for our purposes this Holy Week in Christ’s first word which has been the text of our journeying into the Christ’s Passion. In other words, through our not knowing what we do, we come to know two things: what God does for us in Christ and what that means for us, namely to love as he has loved.
As John puts it in his 1st epistle in a phrase which is one of the Good Friday anthems, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn. 4. 10-12). The first of those anthems is a commentary on the Genesis story of the intended sacrifice of Isaac. What do we behold on Good Friday? “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” the Lamb which, as Revelation, which in another of the sentences in the anthems, says, is worthy of our love and wonder. Why? Because of the sacrifice which is total self-giving love. This is not something which we are capable of imagining or inventing. It is completely given by God in creation and now most movingly in redemption. “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches, and wisdom and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.” The sending away or the overcoming of sin and evil as the contradiction of the goodness of God and his creation is the highest expression of that goodness. It is concentrated for us in the figure of the crucified. He “reigns and triumphs from the tree,” as Fortunatus wonderfully puts it in Vexilla Regis prodeunt sung on Passion Sunday.
We are given to see things in a new light. We behold the divine love that redeems and restores our humanity through all of our contradictions and betrayals of that love. The third Servant Song reveals to us what belongs to the truth of our humanity in the figure of the one who confronts the realities of human sin and evil and is not confounded. It is a picture of what belongs to our humanity in its radical truth as distinct from our failings and fallenness. Isaiah points us to Christ. God will himself provide the sacrifice, the sacrifice which is “love divine, all loves excelling” but as realized in the body of our humanity in Christ.
The radical meaning of that sacrifice and the beginnings of our coming to understand it more fully is revealed at once in John’s Passion and in what follows from it. “It is finished.” This is the last word of Christ from the Cross in John’s Gospel. Like Luke, John gives us three of the seven last words. His first word is equally compelling. “Woman, behold thy Son,” and to John the beloved disciple, “Behold thy mother.” What does it mean? Simply the giving of ourselves in love to one another, a lovely image of our dwelling in the co-inherence of the Trinity with one another. John’s second word helps us to grasp something of the divine purpose for our humanity signalled in the humanity of Christ. “I thirst,” he says. He thirsts at once physically and spiritually, for they are inseparable. They belong to salvation which is the redemption of the whole of creation. It is accomplished in the body of our humanity and so compels us to a deeper understanding of our embodied being as members of the body of Christ. He seeks our ultimate good by overcoming all that belongs to sin and evil. “It is finished.”
This complements Luke’s third word which is the last word of the crucified in the logic of the seven last words. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Such is the gathering of all things back to God in his knowing love for our humanity. It brings to completion what is present in the first word, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Our unknowing is gathered into the all-knowing love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.
The interpersonal relationship of the Son and the Father and the Spirit is the ground of our relationships with one another. These terms or names are not negotiable. They belong precisely to the proper meaning and task of theology, namely our commitment to thinking through the images of Scripture as what is given to us for our good and the good of the Church without which we are not the Church. Good Friday in the second lesson at Evening Prayer from John’s Gospel emphasizes the reality of our embodiedness in the form of our obligations to one another in the body of our being. John, and John alone, tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea, and, get this, Nicodemus, coming and taking the body of Jesus and placing it in a garden tomb where no one had ever been laid.
Nicodemus, you may remember, came to Jesus by night to question him about new birth and life, wondering about how one can be born anew. “How can these things be?” he asked. He knows but does not know fully what he knows. “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?” Jesus says to him. This is the setting for Christ’s commentary on the story in Numbers about the bronze serpent being lifted up in the wilderness as the healing for the sins of Israel. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
That Nicodemus is part of the Good Friday story is especially wonderful. He has come to know what he did not know. He comes in John’s account “bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes”; in short, burying spices. He witnesses to the reality of Christ’s death but with an understanding of the deeper meaning of being born again. It is the idea of life born out of sin and death. Already this is resurrection, made known even in the Passion.
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2025
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