Good Friday, April 6, 2007It’s very hard to preach about the cross. There is so much going on here that words are almost blasphemous. Silence, and gazing deeply, and letting it just sink in, this is primary, this comes before anything else.
But there is a time for words, and here are a few words about Good Friday. First of all, the crucifixion is about God. It is about who God is, and what it is like to be God, and what God thinks about us, and the lengths God will go to in his ancient and ongoing search for us and love for us.
And the crucifixion is also about Jesus. This is the glorification of Jesus, his triumph. The crucifixion is about what it means, and what it looks like, to live perfectly both in the image of God and in the real world. The crucifixion is about faithfulness to the will of the Father, and the consequences of sin—of our sin, and of the sin of the world. It is about what happens when God is God and we are, well, who we usually are.
And the crucifixion is also about all of creation. It is about the separation that had existed among God, the natural world and human beings. The crucifixion is about the mystery of sacrifice and, through that mystery, the healing of those ancient wounds and divisions. Make no mistake—every Good Friday, we behold events of truly cosmic proportions.
All of that is real, and true, and, taking the long view, all of that is what is most important. But there is at least one other part of Good Friday that is also true, and real, and important in a slightly different way. For Good Friday is about us, about us individually—it is about who we are whose we are. I want to look at that a bit today.
My way into that this year came from, of all places, Phillips Brooks’ great Christmas hymn, "O Little Town of Bethlehem". There is a line in that hymn that always touches me, and it came to the fore as I was thinking about Good Friday. The line is "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight". We all know that hymn, and that line, and these words are certainly powerfully true at Christmas time.
But they are even more appropriate today. And they can be words of judgment; they can be words of hope—words that can bring the Cross home to us in, perhaps, a different way.
In our Story, the story that defines who we are as Christian people, the story that begins, "In the beginning..." in the first Chapter of Genesis, in that story the cross is the answer. It is the answer because it faces directly the most ancient and the deepest questions and fears our story raises—questions and fears about how humanity’s estrangement from God can be restored to unity, questions and fears about whether human life, our lives, limited and defined by sin, alienation, and death, can have meaning and hope; questions and fears about how God will bring healing and peace to an humanity, and to individual human beings, (that’s us) scattered and separated by pride, self-will, and a vain struggle to make ourselves the center of the universe; questions and fears about the possibility of the mending of a creation gone terribly wrong and out of control.
The cross, for all its horror, brings to those questions and to those fears—hope, and promise, and the ultimate picture of what it looks like for the true power of God to say "Yes" to the world’s violent word of "No".
Here, death and sin are vanquished. Here, God chooses weakness and sacrifice as the cure for the creation’s brokenness; here, the veil of mankind’s sin that had separated heaven and earth is torn, and unity begins to be restored.
These are the hopes and fears of all the years that are met, and restored, at Golgotha, the place of the skull. These—and no others.
Now, the fascinating question that the Cross ask us is simply this: Are these our hopes and fears? Is this what we most long for, what we most care about, what we most desire, what we would name as most important? Not in the abstract, not when we are feeling especially religious, but day in and day out. What are our real hopes and fears?
Are they about this harsh business of where we stand, in all of our specific and individual humanness, in the real depths of the soul we carry around within ourselves day by day, where we stand in that way in the sight of a loving but just God? Or has the unholy trinity of the world, the flesh and the devil so captured our imaginations and consumed our priorities that our deepest hopes and fears are of another sort altogether?
What do we hope for most passionately? What do we fear most deeply?
Perhaps judgment for our lives lies in whether or not our own personal hopes and fears are in fact met here. If our deepest hopes and our darkest fears are not met by the cross—by self-giving love that abandons everything, even life itself, for the sake of obedience to the Father. If they are not, then we are grasping at false, indeed vain, hopes; and we are preoccupied by shallow fears that will none the less consume and conquer us.
After all, Christ died on this cross to break the curse of evil, and to vanquish it once and for all. If we are not all that much concerned with the power of evil, in our world or in our lives, then we can neither comprehend this, nor can we make it our own. Our attention will simply be focused elsewhere.
That is the challenge of the Cross to us, today. This moment will only speak to us at a level of depth if our deepest selves are attuned to what this is all about. If not, not; and then we might need to take another look at what is going on within us.
The hopes and fears of all the years are indeed met at this moment. What about us; what about ours? In that we find judgment, and challenge, and true hope.
The Lessons are: Isaiah 52.13--53.12; Psalm 22.1-21; Hebrews 10.1-25; John 18.1--19.37
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Fr. Jim Liggett
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This page last updated on April 06, 2007