GOOD FRIDAY SERMON
Tetelestai: THE CROSS
April 9, 2004
Gospel: John 19.30
The weather report for Jerusalem this morning says it is rainy and 48 degrees. It's springtime. The olive trees are in bloom. The hills west of the city are turning green. In a garden still called Gethsemane flowers are pushing up and pollen is in the air dusting everything to a yellow-gold.
But violence, fear and terror are also in the air. I awoke to the 6 o'clock BBC news on the radio. While we slept last night, Israeli tanks battered the Ramallah headquarters of the Palestian Authority. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has declared the one man to blame is Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile in Beirut, Lebanon the Arab League has miraculously agreed to support the Saudi proposal for peace. But then the Saudi Foreign Minister is quoted: "If Israel refuses peace, we will return to violence…to the threat of widening conflict and God knows what will happen." In the last three hours another suicide bomber has taken lives including her own in a shopping mall outside Jerusalem.
The sad truth is there is no one villain; there is violence and fear on all sides.
There was violence and fear in Israel in the springtime 2000 years ago. It wasn't instantly reported around the globe on CNN or the BBC. But eventually this news spread. On a hill, at a place called Golgotha, from noon to three o'clock, violence was done. Something was dying, not just someone. This death would forever change the world.
Three men, hanging on three crosses. In wood and nails something was happening, something earth-shattering, something sea-changing, something of cosmic import.
Two men were common criminals; the third had a sign placarded over his head saying, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." It was what a Governor named Pilate had written despite the protest of the Jews.
Pilate is the usual villain of Good Friday, the man to blame. Every time we say the Nicene Creed this is further engrained ("he was crucified under Pontius Pilate"). Yet in John's account Pilate actually goes to the crowd three different times saying he finds no crime in Jesus. To complicate the situation Pilate seems to invite Jesus to ask for clemency: Don't you realize I have authority to release you? Jesus corrects him; no, Pilate, you are not acting on your authority but only under God's authority. Jesus wants Pilate-and us-to be clear. What is about to happen is under God's authority, God's will, not Pilate's.
This is the church's teaching about Good Friday-that by his obedience to death, even death on a cross, Jesus freed us from our sin and reconciled us to God.
Some of us may take this on faith but it is not the easiest claim to substantiate. Try teaching it to a child. "Jesus was God's only son. God the Father loved us so much that he sent his son to die on a cross for our sins because someone had to pay for all the bad things we have done…"
"Wait a minute," says the child. "You mean to tell me that God killed his own son? Why would any father do that? What kind of father is he anyway?"
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has written about the difference between Judaism and Christianity in his book, Messengers of God. For each faith there is one mountain that rises high. For Jews it is Mount Moriah where Abraham bound his only son Isaac, whom he loved, and laid him on a bed of kindling wood. For Christians the mountain is Golgotha, where another father bound another beloved only son to a deadly piece of wood. The difference between the two religions, says Wiesel, is that in the Jewish story the father does not kill the son, but in the Christian story he does. "For the Jew," Wiesel writes, "all truth must spring from life, never from death."
Whether you agree with Elie Wiesel or not, he has a point. It is difficult to reconcile a God of love with a God who wills a child's death, for any reason. How do you relate to such a parent? Cautiously? fearfully? If God would do that to his son Jesus, what might happen to us?
And yet the Christian faith boldly asserts the exact opposite of Elie Wiesel's statement. We assert that truth and life do in fact spring from death-death on a cross, death on Golgotha that spring day. The death of Jesus, we say, was absolutely necessary.
It was not that Jesus was incapable of saving himself. Rather he chose not to because it was not true to who he was. It's fair to say that he was put to death for being totally who he was.
Let's return to the Abraham and Isaac story for a moment. One interpretation is that it is a story about the basis of Abraham's love of God. In asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, God was asking if he would give up what he loved the most-his son. The son he had waited for into old age; the son who made the prospect of grandchildren real and his reputation as a patriarch, a leader of a nation possible.
In other words, was he willing to give up all the benefits of his faith for the pure love of God?
Abraham was willing to do so and then he didn't have to. We learn that a ram appears in a thicket in the nick of time. Abraham sacrifices the ram in place of his son.
In the Good Friday story, Jesus is willing to give up all the benefits of his faith. While he didn't have to, he chose to do so. For the pure love of God, he emptied himself and gave everything he had to give so at the last hurrah he could say,
It is finished.
Finished. Completed. A fait accompli. Nothing can be added; nothing need be added.
To draw the parallel between the two stories we must not see Jesus equaling Abraham the father, nor Isaac the son. Jesus equals the ram who in a mysterious way became the sacrifice once and for all. Jesus became the ultimate sacrificial lamb so that the sons and daughters of Abraham might go free-and so that all the participants in the Good Friday drama…Judas and Pilate and Caiaphas…the mob, the soldiers, the scribes…all of us might be set free.
This death, this cross, this Friday we insist on calling Good, is God's final answer to our sin; to our broken promises and peace agreements; to all swords and tanks and suicide bombers; to our personal agonies, betrayals and losses.
Where is God in the midst of sorrow and conflict "over there" in Israel or Iraq or Haiti or "right here" in my soul? In all the suffering of the world, God enters the pain and terror and by entering it brings the firstfruits of redemption. It is right to say on the cross Jesus finished the work of our salvation. But we know all too well this does not mean the end of pain or hostilities.
Those of us who gather around the cross this day are tenderly invited to join in God's work of compassion and forgiveness. Though it will take to end of time, God promises to redeem all pain; to wipe every tear from every eye. For, from the cross of suffering grows the tree of life. Let us pray.
Lord Jesus Christ, master carpenter of Nazareth,
Who
on the cross in wood and nails
Did work our whole salvation;
Use well your
tools in these your workshops,
That we who come to you, rough-hewn, may by
your grace
Be fashioned to a truer usefulness and beauty in your service. AMEN
Sermon
preached Good Friday, April 9, 2004, Church of the Holy Communion, Memphis, by
the Rev. Blair Both.
Resource for Elie Wiesel and comments on Abraham: Barbara
B. Taylor's sermon, "Someone to Blame."