Sermon for Good Friday
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
“All the people hung upon his words.” So Luke tells us in his account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. These words are read at Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday. “Take with you words,” the prophet Hosea, says, “and return to the Lord.” These words are read at Evening Prayer on Monday in Holy Week.
Words, and our attention to them, are one of the strong features of our Anglican heritage with respect to the observances of Holy Week. The point and purpose of this week has been to immerse us in the totality of the Passion of Christ, reading from all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. No other Christian tradition demands quite so much. For the attention deficit culture, it is, perhaps, too much. And yet, so necessary.Along with the Passion, readings from the Old Testament and the New, as well from the Old Testament Apocrypha, such as The Book of Wisdom, offer a rich commentary upon the spectacle of Holy Week. Once again, there is much of a muchness, once again, it is de trop. And yet, so necessary and so instructive.
Holy Week is the spectacle of sin and love, the spectacle of our betrayals, on the one hand, and the redemptive love of Christ, on the other hand. Everything converges on the Cross, “that strange and uncouth thing” as the poet, George Herbert, puts it. And yet, as another poet, John Donne, puts it, himself no stranger to the hideous realities of sin and suffering, the image of the crucified is itself a “beauteous form” that “assures a piteous mind.”
