Good Friday
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Today, as one writer points out, is different from all other days. It certainly is for Christians. Even in our secular age, it is still largely called Good Friday, although of course it is mainly a day for shopping and leisure activities for most of the population. But as I say occasionally to people – whatever you believe about Jesus Christ, it is 99% certain that this man lived and was put to death by the authorities. Independent historians certify this fact, and the four gospel accounts tell the same story, with the same principal characters – not just the disciples, but also those in authority at the time: Pontius Pilate, Herod king of Judea, Annas, and Caiaphas the high priest. The details of these people can be checked and verified.
Christians will be observing the day in different ways – by church services, communal gatherings outside such as we had at GMP earlier; by silent processions, by musical events, such as concert renditions of the passions, always found in London and other places today. Even people who do not accept the Christian faith in its entirety will find resonance with this day, which speaks of state brutality, undeserved suffering, cruel torture and execution. Communities that have known long periods of subjugation and suffering find that Good Friday speaks to them powerfully. I remember when living in London that there was a much higher percentage of black people in church on Good Friday than white; the situation was reversed on Easter Day. I said earlier that Good Friday is different from all other days. I suggest we can gauge that something on a cosmic scale was taking place in that three of the four gospel-writers include the detail that darkness came over the whole land for three hours whilst Jesus was on the cross. Was this a judgment for an act of evil? Physical darkness, yes, but spiritual darkness, too.
We might ask what was the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross? The hymn-writer Sydney Carter put his own particular spin on it:
“I danced in the morning / when the sky turned black; it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back. They buried my body and they thought I’d gone / But I am the life, and I still go on.”
But what does it mean to say that through Jesus’ death he takes away the sins of the world? How can it be that this act of barbarity two thousand years ago has benefit for me and for you? Yet we say often that through this act of evil perpetrated on him Jesus delivered and saved the world. There are many theories and explanations of what we call the atonement, and theologians have puzzled over them for centuries, and will no doubt go on doing so in the future. But this does not seem to be the day for great theological discussion, rather a day for hearing the story and allowing that story to speak to us of God’s love for us and for our world.
But for a simple yet profound explanation, we could do no better than to read through the words of the hymn ‘There is a green hill far away.’ ‘We believe it was for us he hung and suffered there…He died that we might be forgiven; he died to make us good…There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. He, only, could unlock the gate of heaven, and let us in.’
Seven words of Jesus from the gospels are recorded, and by words I mean of course utterances. John’s gospel provides three of them, and it is these I would like to use as starting points for our reflections today.
“Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.
Jesus’ ministry had always been about the establishing of right relationships, with love for neighbour going hand-in-hand with love for God. And here, even in his moment of need, pain and vulnerability, he considers the needs of others. William Barclay writes ‘There is something infinitely moving in the fact that Jesus, in the agony of the Cross, when the salvation of the world hung in the balance, thought of the loneliness of his mother in the days ahead.’ In the introduction to the scene of the foot-washing the night before, John tells us that Jesus, “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”
But the quality of intimacy pictured in the scene between Jesus, Mary and John, was not just for family, as we might copy, nor for those next to us, or even those like us. Jesus’ love and care embraced the penitent thief on the cross next to him, assuring him that he would join the Lord in paradise. For Jesus, love and forgiveness go hand-in-hand. And so we are taken back to the astonishing first word from the Cross, recorded by Luke: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” I mentioned on Thursday evening that Jesus had what one writer calls ‘double vision’ – able to empathize with the pains and anxieties of others, even those who had hurt him. Trevor Williams asks, How is this possible? – to find space in our suffering, to recognize the suffering of others? It is possible when we have a sense that we are forgiven; we forgive because we are forgiven.”
St. John’s next recorded word from Jesus on the cross: “After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty’. A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.” No doubt Jesus was thirsty. But it seems the gospel-writer here stresses the fact that Jesus was really human and really underwent the agony of the Cross. At the time of writing this gospel, a certain tendency had arisen in religious and philosophical thought called Gnosticism. It said that spirit was altogether good and matter evil. Since God was spirit, it argued, he could never take on himself a body, because that was matter and matter was evil. So the Gnostics taught that Jesus never had a real body.
So St. John stresses the real humanity of Jesus and the actual suffering. This is another reason why people feel specially close to Jesus on this day; that he knows our pains, sufferings and sorrows, and cares for them. But in crying out “I thirst” maybe we see something else. It is indeed a quote from Psalm 69, but Jesus talked much about spiritual thirst and living water during his ministry. You may remember the encounter he had with a woman at the well of Samaria, who asks him for a drink. He tells her, “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.” So when Jesus cries “I thirst” on the cross, it is also a cry of longing for God’s kingdom to come, at a moment when that may have seemed far away.
Now St. John doesn’t mention the darkness covering the land from noon until three o’clock, but St. Matthew notes that after this Jesus cried with a loud voice and breathed his last. St. John seems to give words to this cry. “It is finished.” Not, as I am sure I have said before on Good Friday, not a defeated weary ‘It’s all over now’, but, curiously to our ears, a cry of triumph. The Greek word used for ‘finished’ is ‘tetelestai’, really meaning ‘completed’ or ‘accomplished’, or maybe in today’s parlance ‘sorted’.
Jesus died knowing that he had faithfully completed the mission for his Father. Let’s remember that the sacrifice or offering of Jesus was not just his death on the cross, but the offering of his whole life. We tend to think of sacrifice as something fairly negative as well as beneficial, but for sacrifice, read offering. Part of the wonder of this day is that Jesus gave his whole life as an offering to his Father. He died knowing that he had completed the great work of bringing about human salvation through that perfect self-offering.
‘It is finished’ – but there is still work to be done, and here is the challenge for us. Neville Ward, a respected Methodist writer, says, “What Jesus achieved does not stand on its own. There is nothing automatic in love. It is a living world of giving and taking, of gesture and response. Without the eager and affectionate response of men and women in the years since his day, the life of Jesus would be no more than a broken column supporting nothing in the desert of time. What he did has to be completed, by people hearing what is being said, and letting it affect them. In this way their lives are dignified by becoming part of it; and he himself goes on living in them. The Church is the means by which people can enter into Jesus’ self-offering and share it. What matters is that it should persist, with others living and dying for it day by day; that his kind of loving should continue to flow – a stream of meaning and inspiration to refresh and feed the spiritual life of the world.
Amen.