Good Friday: A Compendium

I’ve preached on Good Friday almost every year since my ordination, so I have more sermons on these texts than on any other day of Holy Week and Easter (or maybe any day in the lectionary at all). I find it to be, in the moment, a genuine and intense preaching experience. I try to narrow my focus and push on it very hard. Nevertheless, when I see the words again, they feel distant. It wouldn’t feel or be right for me to re-use any of them. So I’m sharing some excerpts in case they may be useful or edifying to someone else.

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Finished (2019)

In the early 400s, a Christian writer described a relic in Jerusalem believed to be the crown of thorns imposed on Jesus’ head before his crucifixion. Whether this relic was genuine, or what anyone said about it earlier than that I don’t know. It was certainly believed to be the real thing.

In the 11th century, the crown of thorns was moved from Jerusalem to Byzantium, the old eastern part of the Roman Empire. Two hundred years later the Byzantine emperor used the crown of thorns as collateral for a loan from the city of Venice. Since the Byzantine Empire was falling apart at the time, the emperors couldn’t make the payments. So the crown was redeemed by the King of France. He brought it to Paris, where it was housed in the church of Sainte-Chapelle until the French Revolution in 1789. The revolutionary government moved the crown to the National Library, where it stayed until the the middle of the 19th century, when when it was given a new home in a relic chapel of the city’s newly-renovated cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris.

On Monday the world watched this astonishing piece of artistic and engineering mastery, fused with centuries of profound religious devotion, go up in flames. Those people especially committed to the religious significance of the place worried about the crown–would it, too, be lost in the flames along with the irreplaceable woodwork and the Gothic-style spire?

But the priest who serves as chaplain of the Paris firefighters, Father Jean-Marc Fournier, rushed in and rescued the crown of thorns and the consecrated Sacrament–the body of Christ–from the flames. The irreplaceable treasures of the cathedral, the relics and artwork, were passed hand to hand, out of the burning structure to safety.

Everything dies. People die, of course. Their heart ruptures or fails. Cancer cells take over their body. They suffer head trauma from a car crash or they overdose, they’re shot or starved or they hang on a cross until their legs can’t hold their chest up and they suffocate. But not just people. Books die. Ideas die. Whole nations and empires and systems of law and government die. The Byzantine Empire died. The Roman Empire died. They all do, eventually.

Even buildings die. They die in earthquakes and floods, they die of neglect or hostility, they get replaced. They burn. Even places as stunning and timeless as Notre Dame, whose artisans laid the cornerstone a hundred years before the towers were completed. Work done by workers who knew they would die long before their work was complete: those buildings die.

Everything dies. And yet nothing is ever finished. If you’ve been to Europe and seen the old churches you know that they exist in layers. The bottom is from the 10th century, the walls from the 14th, the roof is new, only 200 years old. And they are always being rebuilt because they’re always falling down. They’re always dying.

Everything dies but we try to save what we can. We try every treatment, we spend the last dollar, we fight past hope.

Everything is falling down, but we try to preserve it, to build back, to add our own layer, to add our own wall to the project that is never finished. We pass what we love along, hand to hand, in a great human chain whose links all die before the treasure ever reaches safety.

Everything dies, but a fire chaplain can run into a burning cathedral to rescue an ancient relic and the true Body of Christ.

Everything dies, but Peter can draw his sword and strike off the ear of the high priest’s slave. Everything dies, but the king’s followers—if there are enough of them, if they have the heart for it—can storm the palace and rescue the imprisoned king.

St. Augustine, writing sixteen centuries ago about the Roman Empire, said that in the beginning the gods protected the city of Rome, but in the end the city was protecting the gods. He meant this as a criticism. It refuted pagan religion, which worshiped gods precisely because they had the power to protect their city.

But there’s something beautiful about it, too. What kind of a person would not rush into a burning building to save the body of his savior? Who would Peter have been if he had not drawn his sword in defense of his friend, even when the odds were hopeless? Who would we be if we did not risk ourselves to save that thing that can never be saved: the life of another? Who would we be if we did not strive to add our part to the work that is never finished?

That’s what it means to be human. If we’re good at it, we’ll protect what we love, even if it is hopeless to do so. We will strive to finish the work that can never be finished.

This is the day that Jesus died. The people who loved him tried to prevent it, or fled, or denied him to save themselves and suffered for it. But it was all no use. He was captured, put on trial, beaten, mocked, made up with a crown of torture and a robe of ridicule. He was hung on a piece of wood until he asphyxiated.

And yet in the midst of friends who tried and failed to love him as humans love, in the midst of enemies who cursed and abused him as humans do, Jesus is the one offering protection. Jesus gives his blessed mother to the care of his disciple. Jesus stays the hand of Peter, protecting both him and the slave. Jesus looks on him with grief and love. Jesus does not answer the taunts and the violence. Jesus would rather suffer all things, bear every taunt and curse, absorb every blow than harm a hair on one human head. Jesus does not need to be protected. He needs no vengeful army of followers and no host of angels. Jesus is the one who protects until the end.

And in the midst of a world whose work is never complete, where nothing made by human hands is ever finished, Jesus finishes the work of salvation. “It is finished,” he says, and dies. No further suffering will fulfill God’s righteousness. No further death will redeem humanity. No one will ever add one jewel to his crown. Time breaks down every wall and we build back what we love. But salvation is finished forever.

In the days after the fire, it turned out that the chaplain, Father Fournier, had not merely rescued the sacrament. He had held up the Body of Christ, and in the custom of the Roman Church, said the benediction over the five hundred firefighters and the burning cathedral. Jesus blessed and protected them even as the building burned.

In the end, we do not protect Jesus. He protects us. In flame and destruction he would rather be consumed than lose any of his own. In this world where everything dies and nothing lasts and nothing is ever finished, only the crown of thorns can be the royal crown of triumph. Only the lost and abandoned Savior can rescue his city. Only the one who stands amid flame and death can shed his grace on all who draw near. And only the work of divine love can ever be finished.

“The Denial of St. Peter,” Caravaggio (1610)

Scapegoats (2023)

…Throughout the weeks leading up to this night, I have had an attack of conscience. Every three years, we hear long stories from the Gospel according to John on Sundays leading up to Easter. And every year on this night, we hear two full chapters from John’s Gospel. And as I have read and listened to and preached the words of this Gospel, I have been struck by something. There are four versions of the Gospel: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And of those four, John is especially harsh in talking about “the Jews.” The other gospel writers talk about factions within the larger Jewish community: Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, scribes, elders, chief priests. Then, as now, Judaism was a diverse identity with many groups who didn’t necessarily agree on many things or cooperate with each other. Jesus was a Jew and his first followers were one of those groups.

In John’s Gospel, however,  it’s just “the Jews, the Jews, the Jews.” 

Why is this important? In the first place, this language gives us a distorted picture of the story. It obscures the fact that there was no one unified group called “the Jews.” It obscures the fact that Jesus himself was a Jew. So were Peter, Paul, James, John, and virtually every follower of Jesus who has a name in the New Testament. If we’re going to hear the word “Jews” in the context of the New Testament, that word needs to include Jesus and those followers. 

But the second reason is more important: while I don’t think John the gospel writer could have expected this, the language in this story became the basis of a long Christian tradition of hating, fearing, and distrusting “the Jews” as a people. Blaming them, as a group, for the killing of Jesus. Treating them, as a group, as permanently guilty, permanently stubborn, permanently outside. Punishing them, as a group, in reaction to the sins and misfortunes of the majority. 

The story of Jesus’s last days in John’s Gospel is the story of someone being punished for fundamentally arbitrary reasons. Being made into a scapegoat. The high priest was a local official appointed by the Roman authorities. And he was saying something ugly but important: it would be better for one man, Jesus, to be killed if the alternative is political disruption and chaos that provokes the Roman authorities to come in and crush the whole nation. This had happened before in Jerusalem and it would happen again. Caiaphas, the high priest, is being a realist. 

But when we hear this story with its ugly attacks on “the Jews,” we see something else: a story about Jesus being made into a scapegoat ends up creating a whole other scapegoat. Without knowing it, and I hope without meaning it, John the gospel writer taught his readers to choose to punish a minority in their world rather than face themselves. 

…

Where does this search for scapegoats lead but to utter destruction? Where does it lead but to the ruin of individual souls and whole societies? Where does it lead but to the abasement and stifling of our own humanity even as we degrade the humanity of the people we hate and fear? Caiaphas has a point: it is better for one to suffer than for the community to be destroyed. But humans won’t stop at one. 

And yet this is exactly the pain and the evil and the torment that Jesus takes into himself. In the story, the high priest is speaking an accidental truth. Jesus will die on behalf of not just his followers, or Jerusalem, or his people. Jesus will die on behalf of all humanity. That swirl of hatred, fear, confusion, cruelty, and indifference–that maelstrom of human folly–Jesus absorbs it. In today’s story, Jesus sees beyond the moment. He knows what will happen. He knows that he is not the victim of momentary circumstance, but the Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world. Not just the sins of his tormenters, but the sins of those who love him. 

And yes, that forgiving love can and must trick its way into our hearts and lives. Knowing Jesus’s patience under the blows of a cruel world, we have every reason to see and know that there must be no scapegoats. No one must be punished on behalf of the community’s sins. No one must be made into a target, a symbol of rage and frustration….

Wounds (2022)

 …If anything is inevitable in this life, it is this: you will experience wounds. You will scrape your knee or cut yourself shaving or break a bone. You will have sores or stings or boils. You will have wounds no one can see: calcium deposits on your lungs from a respiratory infection, cysts on your liver, a heart valve that stops closing, a brain whose structure is twisted by drugs or trauma or hunger. 

Every wound is unnerving. It shows us something out of place. Even if it’s only a minor thing. The sight of a knee red with blood is startling, even when you know it’s nothing. A wound opens a door between inside and outside. What’s inside is supposed to stay inside and what’s outside is supposed to stay outside. The boundary is supposed to remain intact. And a major concern of religions is maintaining this boundary. Everything that crosses that boundary is a religious problem: excrement, semen, menses, blood from a wound. 

You will experience wounds. Just like you will experience everything that crosses the boundary. We might prefer to remain whole and complete. When we imagine an ideal person or an ideal life, we probably do not picture skinned knees or scarred lungs or thorns piercing the flesh around the skull. …

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews says, “We have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh).” It’s just a parenthesis in our Bibles. But it is a powerful image. There is God’s sanctuary. Inside. There is a world of human life. Outside. And the curtain between inside and outside is the flesh of Jesus Christ. His wounded flesh.

The wounds of Jesus open God to us. Pierced hands and feet, torn back and side, each droplet sufficient to cover all human sins from the tree in Eden down to the end of time, each wound a crossing, a doorway, a span across the boundary separating us from God.

The wounds of Jesus open God to us: Jesus mocked, accused, betrayed, abandoned, denied, thirsty, without breath and yet never more perfect, never more whole, never more crowned in power and glory. 

Truth (2014)

This one started with reciting “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop.

…In this horrible day, this day of mastering all kinds of loss, in this hot and stuffy room surrounded by brutal wicked men, the wickedest man of them all opens a door to Jesus. Those who belong to the truth listen to your voice, do they, Rabbi? Well, tell me, what is truth?

A way out is suddenly there for the grasping. Beyond this question lies the return of lost disciples. Beyond this question lies a warm bed for a man who hasn’t slept and a hearty meal for a man who hasn’t eaten. Beyond this question is another chance, another day, the opportunity to piece together some of what has been lost, if only you can satisfy this sophisticated and vicious man’s curiosity, if only you can give him what he asks for, if only you can become more valuable to him as a living guru than as a dead rebel. If only you can be a successful philosopher instead of a failed prophet.

And the answer Jesus gives in his moment of direst need is—nothing.

Now we may imagine that Pilate asks his question with a cynical sneer. And we may imagine that Jesus refuses to answer because as he preached to his followers you should not give what is holy to dogs, and you should not cast your pearls before swine. We may even imagine that Jesus was the one testing Pilate, and not Pilate testing Jesus.

But in any event, Jesus sees this door open, and then he lets it close. The art of losing is not too hard to master.

And thank God. If Jesus had answered Pilate in this moment, all would truly be lost. Jesus has lived and breathed and eaten and walked truth up until now and if he had turned that truth into mere words—if he had summed up the deep truth of God for Pilate—it might have won him back the day or the year or the lifetime. But he would have lost the truth. Because every truth spoken in words turns stale. It gets picked at and criticized and debunked. It becomes a cliché. It is made to sound foolish. Answering Pilate’s question may get you out of that room, but after you are all gone and the room is no more and Pilate is dust, your truth will grow old too. Words grow old. Words die. And in the middle of a tempest of death and destruction, Christ refuses to make truth a victim. He refuses to add truth to the sacrifice. He offers instead his silence, his nothing. If you are willing to imagine it, he offers his failure. His losing….

The Simplest Things (2015)

This one started with “Meditations” by R.S Thomas. I quoted a lot of poems on Good Friday, once a upon a time.

…God is strange. You can glimpse him once, in a flash. You can sense his presence for a season of your life, and then spend years chasing after him. You can feel him, almost see him plain as day. But then, while everything looks the same, you can’t see God any more. The living room is exactly the way it was, but dad is gone. I’ve met burned-out veterans of this chase for God. They wanted to see what they believed in, or had been told to believe in. And they tried. They tried hard. They tried to guess the password that would open the door, they tried to push the right buttons in the right order, they tried to find the missing clue that would solve the puzzle. But the door never swung back open, the lock never unbuckled, the puzzle never snapped back into focus. A lot of them give up. I don’t blame them.

There is something terrible about Jesus’ words from the cross: “I am thirsty.” It is not surprising. Dehydration was part of the process that kills you when you are crucified. But it is agonizing. Thirst, real thirst, is unbearable. And yet here is the one who told the woman at the well that he could give her living water, needing to be served by the people who are killing him. Where is the God of the stars, the God who gathered the oceans and sets the springs in the deeps of the earth, who waters the earth and orders all things beautifully—where is God now?

And for that matter, where is the God of the heart? Where is the God who strengthens us to bear all things, who burns within us, assuring us no matter what the he is near, that the world can’t harm us, that hunger and thirst and pain are only the passing illusions of our mortal bodies? Why couldn’t Jesus reach the end of his horrible race without that last tremble of physical frailty? Where is God now?

Well, God is right there. It’s like the poet writes:

“And to this one,
[God] says: Because of
your high stomach, the bleakness
of your emotions, I
will come to you in the simplest
things, in the body
of a man hung on a tall
tree you have converted to
timber and you shall not know me.”

That poet, a man named R.S. Thomas, was an Anglican priest in Wales. And he wasn’t lying—he had bleak emotions and he did not walk around feeling the presence of God all the time. He was also apparently a pretty sour fellow—his son reports that he would drone on in his sermons about the evils of refrigerators, mostly to parishioners who couldn’t afford them anyway.

But he was right about this: our faith is about the simplest things. A human body—a thirsty, beaten, betrayed, forsaken body on a cross—is how God wishes to be seen, even by people who are tired of chasing him in the stars or in their hearts. God is always there on the cross….

Not Me (2021)

When the Italian painter known as Caravaggio took it upon himself to depict St. Peter denying Jesus on the night of his arrest, he painted him turned slightly away from the woman interrogating him, with his hands pointed inward. You see on the face of the apostle all the emotions he must have been feeling: fear, sorrow, and a hint of shame. He looks sincere but miserable. As if, perhaps, he even wants his lie to be the truth. As if he wishes he had made another choice those years before on the seaside when he was invited to fish for people. As if he wishes he had been in Jerusalem by coincidence, just another bystander to another gruesome death of the Roman era. As if he is saying, “Not me,” and almost meaning it.

And this is Peter, the Rock, who gets his name from Jesus himself because he speaks up under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and names Jesus Son of God and Messiah. You, Simon, are the Rock, Jesus tells him. On you, the Rock, I will build my church, and Hell itself will not stand against this church’s onslaught.  

Tonight, under questioning, at the edge of the scene, the Rock crumbles. Whether Jesus did not meet Peter’s expectations of the Messiah, or whether Peter did not live up to his own hopes for himself of bravery and loyalty, Peter fails. Denial of those we know and love is a hard sin because it is a denial of ourselves. “It’s not me. You’ve got the wrong guy,” Peter says. But it was him. And he is denying himself. 

Good Friday is the eternal trial of an inconstant and wavering human nature placed side by side with the constant and unwavering love of God. 

In the reading from the Prophet Isaiah today, we hear God’s servant shown forth as one who “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” 

The servant was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; “and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.”

This one who is despised and rejected, who must be turned from in horror, turns out to be God’s own servant. Far from being cursed and outcast by God, the servant turns out to be the one who is carrying the sins of all, bearing the burdens, even pleading for those who taunt and abuse him. You will see the Servant, says the prophet. You will most definitely see him. But you will not like him. You will not cleave to him. You will look away and pretend you don’t know him. 

This is a powerful human instinct. We are animals who are fine-tuned to recognize danger. We have a keen eye for who is winning and who is losing. We know when to flee the scene, when to hide, when to pretend we have nothing to do with all this mess. That’s all Peter is doing. That’s all the rest of the disciples are doing as they see the winds change and run for cover. “Not me!” Get out, get safe, make arrangements to live and fight another day.

But we can only do this to each other at a high cost. As soon as the cock crows, Peter weeps. The terrible weight of his disloyalty crashes down on him in an instant. A minute ago he would have run away long before if he could have. Now, if he could, he would take back those denials. He would own his love and bear the cost. So he weeps as his broken heart flutters back to its Lord. That moment, Lord, is not me. 

It is the same man who denies and who weeps. That’s discipleship in a nutshell. We change, we hide, we flee, we weep with tears of repentance. We hide our face from God and then run back. 

And this is why salvation is not won by ourselves, for ourselves. If we could bear our own sins and the flutter of our hearts, we would have to. There would be no alternative. There would be no grace and no mercy. Peter’s denial would be final. He had come to the critical moment, he had failed, and that failure would haunt the rest of his life, if he had to be responsible for his own salvation. I would have been a door he walked through and that locked behind him, never to open again.

But Peter does not bear his own sins. You and I do not bear our own sins. Jesus does. Peter can now say, and know, “it was not me who saved my soul.” If it depended on Peter the Rock, or James or John the Beloved or you or me, all would be lost. But it wasn’t Peter or James or John or you or me. It was Jesus….