Sermon for Good Friday
Good Friday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Simeon’s prophetic words to Mary follow immediately upon his prophecy about Jesus. “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against.” It speaks to the meaning of Good Friday not just for “many in Israel” but also for the Gentiles, as the Nunc Dimittis makes clear. Christ is “a light to lighten the Gentiles,/and the glory of thy people Israel.” Holy Week has presented us with the spectacle of all human sin and cruelty as visited upon Jesus Christ. It is a week in which “the thoughts of many hearts” are brought to light, and if we have hearts to feel what we see and hear, our souls are surely doubly pierced: in grief and sorrow for our sins, and in joy and gladness for the love of God in Christ. But only because he is pierced by us and for us on the Cross. The question is whether we will be pierced inwardly by what we behold and see. If so, then this day will rightly be “Good” Friday for us individually and collectively.
We behold Christ crucified and we hear the last words of Christ on the Cross. In the devotional tradition of The Seven Last Words of Christ Crucified as developed in Lima, Peru, in the 17th century by an indigenous Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, and transported from there to Europe and then back again to the Americas, the last words begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father in the bond of their mutual and eternal love in the Spirit, words found in Luke’s account of the Passion. Tonight in The Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, we hear and participate in The Passion according to St. John.
John provides three of Christ’s last words just as Luke gives us three words of Christ. Matthew and Mark give us the same one word, Christ’s cry of dereliction. In Bedoya’s ordering, Luke gives us the first, second, and seventh word; John, the third, fifth and sixth word, Matthew and Mark, the fourth word. Tonight we hear the last word of Christ in John’s account: “It is finished.” It is the only word from the Cross without reference to anyone personally, without a personal pronoun, as it were. It is a kind of objective summary or conclusion. The Greek makes it clear that it signals the sense of accomplishment, an end or purpose achieved; a telos.
