Good Friday 2008

In our contemporary culture there is a lot of rhetoric about separation of church and state, religion and politics. Before us today is the passion narrative of the arrest, judgment, execution of Jesus, his death and burial. The judge in this case was Pilate, a functionary of the state, but the ones who brought the charges were the religious leaders. According to the Gospel of John, the story is a collision between religion and politics. Pilate and the chief priests conspired to solve their common problem – a peasant who proclaimed “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Sons and daughters of God have been killed in every generation, in holy wars, concentration camps and while speaking truth to power, in Cape Town, Memphis, and El Salvador. The charges are consistent: they are guilty of treason (against the state) and/or blasphemy/heresy (against the church). Looking and listening closely, we recognize that the same charges were made against Jesus that are being made today – by those in power who desperately want to keep their illusion of control intact.

Jesus, speaking the truth to power, told those in charge of the temple that they were failing their position – they were not doing the work of God. The leaders were abusing their power – enforcing laws and rules that burdened the people – and performing services they called worship in order to impress others. Then as if having the temple leadership angry was not enough trouble for one year, Jesus stood up to the Roman officials too. He suggested they too were not doing their job. They were to keep the peace but they were so oppressive, using weapons to control the common people, using abuse and terror to sustain their powerbase. The strategy will fail because in time the people will revolt against oppression. Oppressive rule is the opposite of peace. If you want peace, you must work for justice. This truth is consistent throughout the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) as it is in the New Testament.

Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was condemned and killed by law and order allied with religion. Beware of those who claim to know the mind of God and who will use force to make others conform to their ideas. Beware of those who cannot distinguish God’s will from their own will. Temple police are always a bad sign.

Each year as we listen to the Gospel of John’s passion narrative, we struggle to understand the depth of love poured out for us. The weight of the cross, the pain of the crucifixion, the desertion of Peter and the other disciples, and the grief of the few family and friends who were at the foot of the cross are almost too much to take in or comprehend. We ought to try!

It is through our ability to recognize the tragedy of the Cross that we can see other tragedies and feel the weight of humanity’s sorrow, of the injustice being perpetrated against so many of our brothers and sisters around the world. We need to experience the guilt of those screaming “crucify him” and “give us Barabbas.” We need to feel the embarrassment of denying or betraying a friend. We ought to be able to see that the radical inclusive love Jesus demonstrated to strangers, foreigners, the socially outcasts and the religiously unclean made him an enemy of the leaders of church and state.

Have we dared follow the way of the cross to the extreme of welcoming the outcasts, befriending persons our church or state call “other” for whatever category of difference is in vogue? We cannot experience the sorrow of Good Friday without experiencing humanity’s sorrow also.

Death by crucifixion was horribly painful and humiliating. Watching must have been excruciating for his mother, Mary, and the beloved disciple. As Jesus’ strength began to fail and he knew he was dying, he looked down and spoke: “woman, behold your son; son, behold your mother.” The crushing pain of a mother watching helplessly as her son dies surely stirs some sense of compassion in even the hardest heart. He knows her pain. Jesus knows the unjust and unequal plight of women and what this will mean for his mother. Arranging for the beloved disciple to “adopt” her is practical and it is symbolic. We too become adopted sons and daughters of God by the self-gift offered for us.

It is finished Jesus cried and gave up his spirit. The dead body is taken down and given to his mother. She holds him again as she did in Bethlehem years earlier. Her heart is broken, her face streaked with tears, her body weak with grief and loss and sorrow. Perhaps the beloved disciple supports her, helps with the weight of the dead body. We want to look away…but we dare not. If we can’t look at the cross and understand that Jesus is really dead, his life taken in cruel and inhumane manner, and that it was given freely out of love, we cannot begin to understand the power of the resurrection.

God gives all so we can begin to understand unconditional love. To the extent to which we can dare to be Mary or the beloved disciple as we hear and mediate on the death of Jesus on the cross, we can be opened to love as we are loved. Once we understand that the death of Jesus is all self-gift, we may tremble at the prospects of walking the way of the cross. Governments and religions have not changed very much – speaking the truth to power is still dangerous.

In the face of the purity of Jesus’ love, hypocrisy is exposed for what it is, sin. With all those who betrayed, denied, plotted, and screamed for his death, we must see the truth about our own complicity with the powers of church and state. We are exposed and we don’t like it. Yet, knowing and confessing that sin, all sin, your sin and my sin, means seeing the reconciling love of Jesus on the cross for what it is. The cross is a symbol of the consequences of sin and our forgiveness. Forgiven of compliancy, apathy, self-focus, we are loved just as we are and set free to live in Christ.

We are free to stand for peace, justice and reconciliation in our time, we are part of something bigger than ourselves. We see the liberating love of the cross in Desmond Tutu and South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission or Mother Teresa of Calcutta seeing the face of Jesus in the poorest of the poor, or Romero saying Mass in El Salvador while soldiers pointed their guns at him.

Knowing Jesus has conquered sin and death we are liberated from a false sense of ourselves, a false sense of control and power. We can be at the foot of the cross and know that in this is something very good: it was all for love. Every pain, humiliation and sorrow that human beings can experience, the second person of the Trinity has shared with us, experienced as one of us. God so loved that God acted for us. Through the cross we are welcomed home, despite our failures and sins. We are shown the truth about ourselves and the truth about God. Now we begin to see why this somber day of pain and grief so infused with love is good. Love has met us where we are and restored us to God.