Good Friday – April 6, 2007
John 18:1 – 19:37
St. Giles Church, Northbrook IL – The Rev. Cynthia J. Hallas
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
The words of that beloved and universally known spiritual, that we’ll all sing together in just a few minutes, ask a question that is basic to our liturgical observance of this day.
We’ve just concluded our customary ‘group’ reading of the Johannine passion. By reading it the way we do, we have put ourselves, as best we can, in 1st century Judea, and have involved ourselves in actions that we like to think we’d protest or shun or at least avoid if confronted with them today – capital punishment inflicted on a clearly innocent man, public execution as mass entertainment, the manipulation of popular opinion. If we were, in fact, there when they crucified our Lord, what role would we take?
For myself, I know that I cannot witness or read John’s version of Jesus’ passion without getting caught up in the sheer humanity of it all. It seems that all the world’s suffering, all humanity’s brokenness, all society’s evil, all a culture’s dysfunction come to a head on a hill outside of Jerusalem in what was a hugely public event that has become for us an action of universal meaning. We all have the gift of historical hindsight and we would be horrified to think that what happened to the Son of God 2000 years ago could happen to the Son of God in our own day and time and yet all we have to do is look around us, read the newspapers, log on to the internet, listen to radio, watch TV, to know that in fact, it could and it would and it does. Good Friday is a day that lets us look into a mirror, and what we see reflected back to us, about ourselves and our world, gives even the most optimistic and hopeful among us reason for doubt, fear, and despair.
And yet at the same time the story it tells is deeply personal. One of the reasons for that is that each of the ‘characters’, the ‘players’ if you will, these people who were there when they crucified our Lord, displays characteristics that each and any of us possess and that can and do all too easily find their way to the surface of our behavior.
Peter is a well-meaning but impulsive man who really, really wants to follow Jesus completely and totally. But Peter, perhaps more than any other disciples, understands the cost of that and he has trouble making that commitment once he does realize what is at stake. Jesus keeps surprising Peter by revealing what and who he is, and Peter responds by attempting to re-make Jesus in the image Peter wants for him. Peter’s denial of the growing threat to Jesus, and reality of the cross, cause him to deny his participation in Jesus’ life and ministry at the time his Lord needs his loyalty most. It’s so tempting for us to try to deny the reality of the cross in our own life; to try to craft for ourselves a Messiah who doesn’t require of us what Jesus has asked, and to deny the reality of life lived under the shadow of the cross and so we must ask ourselves: were we there when they crucified our Lord?
And look at Judas. For all that religious and secular history both have held him in contempt, Judas probably remains the most elusive and fascinating of the twelve. Such history as we have paints Judas as talented and capable, with potential and education and probably ambition above that of his fellow disciples. He started out just like everybody else, and one can only wonder how differently the book of Acts might have read had Judas not chosen the path that he chose. Ultimately, Judas, not unlike Peter, wanted a very different sort of Messiah but unlike Peter, Judas took power into his own hands in an attempt to control the actions of God, and Jesus paid dearly for that power play. We might, in the shadow of Judas, confront ourselves with our own occasions of wanting to manipulate and control God, rather than allowing God’s purposes to control our lives. Were we there when they nailed him to the tree?
Let’s expand the circle a bit. Pilate is a frustrated, second- or third-tier politician, wanting so much more from his political career but stuck in backwater Judea. Pilate is clearly fascinated by this Jesus of Nazareth; it’s hard to believe a Roman governor would spend so much time interrogating a Jewish troublemaker otherwise. He is sympathetic, inclined to spare Jesus, to release him. But Pilate is also a man for whom a little power, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing. Finally convinced that pardoning Jesus would ruin his career, Pilate gives in to the mob’s wishes and literally washes his hands of the whole situation. It’s easy to look at Pontius Pilate and see, reflected back at us, all those times when our own ambition or comfort or convenience took precedence over the servanthood or discomfort or inconvenience of living out the gospel mandate. Were we there when they pierced him in the side?
And finally, consider the religious leaders - Annas, Caiaphas - and the group they lead and control.
They refuse to see the truth of God that is embodied in Jesus of Nazareth; it’s far too inconvenient, too troublesome to deal with; and the message of good news, of inclusion that Jesus has brought to the outcast, the poor, the downtrodden, is far too threatening to their own position and view of religion.
They know all they or anyone else needs to know about God and that’s enough, thank you very much.
And then I look at what’s going on in our Anglican communion today. When a struggle for so-called ‘orthodoxy’ masks what is in reality a struggle for power and control, it’s clear that even those who profess the Christian faith can get can find it easier to cling to institutional power than strive for Christian unity. Were we there when they crucified our Lord?
In a sense, we were all there, and we are still there – the world still doesn’t get it, the Church still doesn’t get it. We still want to crucify goodness and make excuses for evil; we still find it all too easy to have no king but the emperor.
And yet, there is on this day an exchange, a scene that points us toward a horizon of hope. Jesus’ mother, the woman who gave him life, weeps at the foot of the cross as that life is taken from him.
Widowed, presumably, and without other family, she could easily have been left with no one to care for her, a cruel sentence for a woman in that time and culture. But in a final act of love and compassion, Jesus entrusts her to the care of the ‘disciple whom he loves’. In the wake of violence, betrayal, and mockery, those last moments contain the seeds of hope and reflect back to the world the fact that the light of love cannot be fully extinguished.
When it is over, when it is finished, when Jesus’ spirit is given up to God, that is what is left to us. On this Good Friday, seemingly robbed of the source of goodness and unsure about what lies ahead, that is the hope we cling to.