Good Friday 2009

04/10/09
Good Friday 2009
Hudson

Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here to remember a dark time in the history of the world. We come to remember a time when humanity rose to new heights of evil and treachery. We remember the day that human beings committed a murder. It was not a common murder, as terrible as that would be. We remember today the day that human beings rose up against and murdered the God of the universe. Though he didn’t mean it in quite this way, on that Good Friday, all those many years ago, we could say, along with Nietzsche, “God is dead. We have killed Him.”

I do not say, “They have killed Him,” but “we have killed Him.” Christ’s death was not simply a tragedy. It was not merely a miscarriage of justice, it was an act of atonement. Jesus did not simply die, He died on our behalf and in our place. It was not simply the sins of the world that Jesus bore on that cross, but our sins, the sins that we have willfully committed, the sins that we simply cannot atone for. The God of the universe, out of His intense love for you and me, took on flesh and lived among us to show us who He is. We have seen the Son, so we have seen the Father. A singer of the last decade asked the question, “What if God was one of us.” Jesus though fully God, is one of us, so, at least for Christians, this is not an abstract question. Regardless of how we feel about it, humanity’s answer to the question, “What if God was one of us,” was, “We will kill Him.”

I think that we in the modern Western church, with our warm and safe buildings, with our stained glass windows, and our acceptance by the culture, don’t always realize how significant the death of Christ really is. I think that we remember it with a kind of sentimental fondness, as if we either forgot that a real human being, the Word of God made flesh, had actually died a terrible death because of our sin, or because we would rather think that it was a painless process.

And yet, when we learn about what crucifixion actually looked like, we realize that painless is the last word to describe it. The word excruciating was invented to describe the pain that comes from being nailed to the cross. But physical pain was not all there was. There was emotional pain. We read about Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane sweating blood as he was in agony about going through with the will of His Father. There was also profound spiritual pain. As Psalm 22 prophesied, Jesus cried out “Eloi eloi, lama sabachthani,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus’ death was not something of little consequence. It was so traumatic that it drove our Lord and Savior, who is God and has been in perfect fellowship with the Father and the Holy Spirit since eternity past, to cry out and feel completely abandoned by God. When we romanticize it, or when we make a habit of speaking glibly about it, we forget that it was a time of real pain; a time where Jesus suffered the pain that we deserve.

All of this is to say that Good Friday, if it shows us nothing else, shows us the absolute seriousness of human sin. In our day and age, we have tried to deal with the sinfulness of humanity in a variety of ways. We have tried to educate the masses, believing that, if we can just teach people right from wrong, nobody would ever choose to do wrong and our problems, individual as well as social, would be gone. More recently, we have turned to legislation to make sure that, if people are going to continue in practices that are dishonoring to God, they should at least be illegal. It is as if we have finally realized that human sinfulness runs so deep that nothing can stop us from behaving wickedly other than the threat of legal action.

Despite all of our best efforts, evil still continues, both in individuals and in our social structures. We are now more highly educated sinners than we used to be, but we are sinners still. Our sin might not only be against the laws of God, but also against our human laws, but we break them all the same.

What else can we do? If human education does not work and human legislation does not work, what in all the universe can solve the problem of evil? The classic question, “If God is all good and God is all powerful, why is there evil in the world?” shows that we do not understand God’s goodness, God’s power, or the seriousness of evil like we should.

Evil is more serious than we ever imagined. No clever human solutions can overcome evil. It might restrain it, but it is always there, lingering under the surface. The New Testament shows us that nothing short of the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God that became flesh, coming to earth, being hated, mocked, spit at, and crucified, can overcome the tremendous power of sin. This shows us how much we are in bondage to sin. Try as we might, we cannot pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and become moral people simply by the force of will. Our good intentions, our hard work, our wholesome upbringing do not do anything without the atoning sacrifice of the Son of God and the radical empowering of the Holy Spirit.

However, in the end, our purpose for gathering here in worship to our God is not simply to dwell on the seriousness of our sin and the mournful reality that Jesus had to die to atone for it. We also need to realize that God’s goodness and God’s power are different than we often think. God’s goodness is not a goodness that is far away from us. It is not a goodness that simply stands in judgment of our failure to be good. It is a goodness that comes oh so very close. It is a goodness that takes our broken and diseased humanity upon God’s self, shouldering our burdens, bearing our sin, and bringing the reconciliation that we both desperately need and are unable to bring about on our own. It is a self-giving love whereby God places us, broken and sinful human beings, above God’s own Son, so that God might not be God without us.

God’s power is different than we often realize, too. Our culture wants to think of God’s power like it thinks about human power, just multiplied a couple million times. We want to think about God micro-managing all of creation down to our daily activities. But this is not how we see God’s power manifest in Jesus Christ. Remember, there is no God other than the God who is revealed in Christ through the Holy Spirit. We do not see God snapping His divine fingers and simply doing away with pain and suffering; instead, we see God entering into that suffering, making it God’s own and overcoming it from the inside. We do not see a God that is afraid of death; we see God enduring our death, taking it upon Himself and defeating the grave, removing its sting and giving us hope and joy in the face of difficult times. It is not a power that manifests itself over and against our humanity, but rather in and through it.

So, as we remember the price that has been paid on our behalf, let us let the sheer magnitude of the love and power of God sink deeply into our hearts. Today is not simply a day when we can gather together as an ecumenical body of Christians, joined in worship. Today is a day when we remember what God has done for us. Our acceptance in the eyes of God is not something that we deserve simply on the basis of creation, it is not something that we have earned ourselves. It is the result of a great sacrifice, the payment of our enormous debt by the one who knew no sin and should not have had to die. What is more, it is something that we receive only with the empty hands of faith. Lord, we have nothing to give, but we receive your gift with thanksgiving and with joy. Let us pray. AMEN