Good Friday sermon 2010

Good Friday
April 2, 2010
When I was 3 or 4 years old, I had a conversation with my mother on Good Friday that may be one of my earliest memories. She was trying to explain to me the significance of the day, that it was called Good Friday, and it was the day that we remembered the death of Jesus on the cross. When I heard that the Jesus who I sang about, the Jesus who loves me and who is the lover of all little children, red, and yellow, black, and white, they are precious in his sight, when I heard that Jesus had been killed, I started weeping silently, great, big, tears spilling down my face. When my mother turned from what she was doing and saw how I was grieving, she hugged me and got down to my level, and she tried to explain that yes, it is very sad that Jesus died, but that we call it Good Friday because we believe that the story ends happily with his resurrection from the dead and our inclusion in all of that saving work.
I’m not sure that I got it then, and I’m not sure that I get it even now. I was still sad, and I think it’s appropriate to carry some of that sadness, some of that grief with us into our observance of Good Friday this day.
In our Good Friday observance, we focus on the death of Jesus, how he dies in pain, abandoned by friends, mocked by his enemies, ignored by others, and God does not intervene to fix any of it. We keep vigil with him as he dies; we watch him suffer; we acknowledge how our own actions of “turning to our own way” cause his suffering and the suffering of others in this world. We hear how he affirms the depths of our human existence with his recitation of Psalm 22 from the cross, how his very lips affirm the forsakenness of the moment of his crucifixion and also his complete trust in God, and we recognize in that some of our own human experience, the comparable rhythm of divine absence and presence.
But we also must be mindful of the instruction from the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, who writes, “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.” Even as the cross is a symbol of suffering, it is also, for us a symbol of hope. The Anglican priest Kenneth Leech writes, “The uniquely Christian claim is that the cross is the focal point for the knowledge of God. Through the cross, we are integrated into the life of God. We can say that the cross is the self-definition of God, the heart of the mystery of God’s being. It is the center of all faith and all theology.” God revealed in the cross, in the death of Jesus, that God was willing to do whatever it would take to reunite us with God. God would not let our destructive behavior, our self-serving ways, serve as an impediment in our relationship with God. The Eastern Orthodox have a simple phrase that gets to the heart of this when they address Christ and say, “you left nothing undone until you had brought us to heaven.”
Anything that we could ever experience, any desolation, any forsakenness, any sorrow, any hell, Christ has already experienced. He has been through it, in his death, and he has come out the other side in his resurrection, and he willingly brings us with him. Upon this rests our hope.
No matter how bereft we may feel, no matter how forsaken or abandoned, no matter how we may despair, we look to the cross as a tangible reminder that Christ has been there, that he is still there with us, and we cling to that promise of new life and resurrection in faith and in hope.
“Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.”