April 10, 2009
Good Friday Office (Year B)
Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25 or Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9;
John 18:1-19:42
I have several crosses. I had thought to bring a few of them to share with you tonight, but decided describing them would be enough. One large one, my uncle gave me because his mother, my grandmother, had given it to him for his ordination, and when I was ordained, he wanted me to have it. Another is a cross that was my great-aunt’s, and it was a gift to her from her husband, my great-uncle, on Christmas, 1889 – or so it says on the back of it. I have crosses on the walls of my office, some were gifts, some I purchased as I traveled around the world, one from El Salvador, one from Israel, one for Guatemala, one from France, several that were gifts, one for serving on the Standing Committee, one from a hair dresser when I was ordained, one in a bubble blower that a child gave me.
And I have several jewelry crosses from around the world, too, gifts, mostly. I don’t buy them for myself knowing I have far too many already. I would guess that you, too, have a cross or two in your possession. And after hearing the passion read, for the second time this week, I am startled once again with how we have in two thousand years tamed the cross beyond recognition.
Do we hear, any of us, do we hear what happened to Jesus? Do we absorb it, really absorb it? I know that I rarely do. I would wager the reason so few attend services on Good Friday, or even during Holy Week, is because we don’t really want to absorb the truth about the cross. It is too terrible, and it is too threatening. It is too demanding. We much prefer, I much prefer the incredible truth of Easter, that we are a people forgiven, that we are people in eternal relationship with God, that we are worth saving, that we can live in that hope. These are the Christian messages I like to preach about and cling to. The Good Friday shameful cross is too much, and this year with all that is going on in the world it seems even more terrible.
But the truth is there is no way to Easter, but first we have this horrible cross in front of us, not some bejeweled, tamed, golden adornment, but the splintery, cruel, death dealing cross upon which an innocent human being was hung that we might not ever face eternal damnation and/or the just consequences of our own sinful actions.
Most of us would much prefer that our expectations and hard work would provide us with all the things in life we think we deserve. But the truth is that there is only the way of the cross, which is the way of a condemned and crucified Christ. If Jesus is our God incarnate and Jesus was on the real cross, not some tamed version of a cross, if he hung there, died there for us and for our brokenness, then we cannot wish that our following him will be all roses and light, that if we follow, we will find all reward after reward for our goodness and productivity. NO! We have to expect thorns, not jewel encrusted gold. As followers we can only expect that we will encounter the costly thing, the thing that chafes and burns and causes splinters. True followers know that getting what they deserve is not what justice is about, it’s not what the cross is about; rather it is about the total giving up of one’s self, that others might be served and loved.
That is the path of life for the Christian. That is the road we are to take. Becoming a Christian does not insure us of a life free of pain and hardship, rather it assures us that we will never be alone in the hardships, difficulties, and rough roads we travel because Jesus knows only too well the pain of such human living and travels them with us.
When I hear the gospel read on Good Friday, not only do I dread hearing the part about Jesus being nailed to the cross and think of all my own crosses so lovely and tamed in contrast. But I also dread the part where those who loved him betrayed him. I dread hearing how the crowds who adored him a few short days before as he rode into town on the back of donkey in a parade counter to the one the Romans were putting on for the Roman officials arriving to keep the peace during Passover, I dread hearing how those crowds now turned so quickly against him and watched him tried, humiliated, crucified, and killed.
I know they didn’t really, most of them anyway, think about the consequences of their not speaking up for him. I know that Peter intended to support Jesus but yet he denied him. I know that they were good faithful people who just didn’t want to get caught in the thick of it all. I know they were seduced by the rhetoric of the leaders and even inspired to add their own two cents – there is nothing like being on the winning side.
I know how this happens. I have been there, on both sides of such a human dynamic. But when I think of the cost, I am ashamed, not only of my own culpability in such instances, but for all of us. For, like you, I can observe this mob mentality, not just in myself, but in others, from politicians to sports fans to office politics, even in the Episcopal Church as we prepare for General Convention, sides are forming, plots are thickening. I am saddened when I read this passion each year, horrified at the mob who was with Jesus one day, and moving against him but a few days later. But this year it has especially hit home for me, that the human followers of the way of Jesus, the Christians, have not progressed in two thousand years to being a people who defend each other in the face of injustice, that the cross is still so often the way we force on others rather than, as Jesus did, taking it up ourselves.
It is Good Friday, ‘God Friday,’ if you will. We are by the wood of the cross, the terror of the cross, the pain of the cross, called to something more than we could ever be alone. As we wear our lovely crosses, the ones we have been handed down or given in celebration of the important days of our lives, may they remind us that the way of the cross in not smooth, that the jewels on the crosses are not precious stones, but the life and the labor we can give for and to others. Jesus showed us the way of the cross, may we be faithful enough to follow.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd