GOOD FRIDAY – Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25; John 18:1-19:42 – 10 April 2009 – A sermon given by The Rev. Peter A. Munson for St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado
The “We” of Good Friday
AWFUL NEWS
I have been both angry and deeply grieved by some of the recent news in our country. And no, I am not talking about the financial crisis, although that certainly has its awful elements, too. I am talking about another spate of mass shootings. Just on April 3 and 4 there were three. An immigrant from Vietnam killed 13 people in a shooting rampage inside an immigration services center in Binghamton, New York, before killing himself. A man in Pittsburgh opened fired on police who responded to a domestic disturbance, and killed three officers. And a man from Graham, Washington who found out his wife was going to leave him for another man, killed all five of his children, ages 7 to 16, and then killed himself. And these three shootings follow four other mass shootings during the month of March – two in California, one in North Carolina, and one in Alabama. That adds up to seven mass shootings in a little over a month’s time. Seven!
Part of me just does not want to see and acknowledge the truth of how violent we are. It’s the same reason why many people would much rather look at a bare cross on the wall, and not a cross with a corpus – a cross with Jesus hanging there on it. It is not only difficult to look at Jesus in anguish on the cross because of how awful it is to see someone being tortured and killed. We also don’t want to face the violence that is within ourselves, the kind of violence that put Jesus on that cross.
We have been singing the Kyrie (“Lord, Have Mercy”) throughout Lent at each of our Sunday services. The version we have been using at 10:30 begins like this:
“Look around you, can you see?
Times are troubled, people grieve.
See the violence, feel the hardness,
All my people, weep with me.”
And the chorus:
“Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.”
Translation: Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. As in, Lord have mercy on all of us!
Another thing I notice is that I want to distance myself from these mass murderers. I don’t understand their passion for guns. I definitely don’t understand how a man, no matter how distraught, can kill his five children. Or how someone can open fire in a nursing home, or in a place where innocent people are trying to learn English.
I suppose this is absolutely the classic case – the classic opportunity – for you and me to distance ourselves from “those sinners”. It doesn’t get any more classic than saying, “Well, at least I haven’t killed anyone. At least I’m not a mass murderer.” These mass shootings give us the classic opportunity to judge ourselves as the great moral ones, the “good people”, while we look down at “those evil ones” – “them”.
GOOD FRIDAY – Numbered with the transgressors
But you know what? Good Friday, of all days, is a day when we are not allowed to let ourselves off the hook so easily.
Did you catch the Isaiah reading, a reading that we see as one of the prophecies about our Lord? Especially that last verse: “Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong…” Why? Because he blew everyone else away with his mighty power? No, just the exact opposite, actually. “… because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” (Isaiah 53:12)
Jesus, the man who “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21), numbered himself with the transgressors. And that just doesn’t mean the two transgressors who were nailed to crosses on either side of him. It means all of us.
Listen to some very wise words from Martin Smith:
“We build up our false selves on the principle that we are right and good enough; evil lies outside us, incarnated in “them”, villains and criminals, whores and vixens, rebels and addicts [perhaps we might add “greedy financiers and CEOs”]. To abandon this principle is tantamount to consenting to the dismantling of the very structure of our selves. If “I” and “them” should give way to “we”, then a new self with a new center would have to be found. The cross kills the old self that was based on the fiction that the others are the guilty.”
He goes on:
“We are all one in our guilt, we are all one in our need, we are all one in the embrace of a suffering God… He was numbered with the transgressors, crucified between the thieves. We will not find him in our hearts except in the same company. For each Good Friday to be good the Spirit must take us by the hand and reestablish our contact with that inmost core of recalcitrant evil, enmity, and impotence where we are sisters and brothers of the most depraved and lost. That is where Christ is, clasping them with his pierced hands…”
“Taking up the cross means leaving the company of the good for the company of the condemned. Why else were the Romans’ victims made to carry the crossbar of their instruments of torture, except to advertise their criminality to the populace?”
“I take up the cross and follow Jesus whenever I acknowledge my oneness with the guilty, whenever I stop pretending that they are an alien class. I put the cross down and hide among the moral crowd whenever I gloat over the sins of others; whenever I thank God that I am not as other men are; even when I say: “There but for the grace of God go I”; whenever I resort to all the tools of projection to distance myself from the chaotic and the bad. The extent to which I have taken up the cross will be shown by the frequency and intensity of my prayers for sinners, enemies, and the lost as my brothers and sisters, my own flesh. Which means that I have hardly begun to take up my cross.”
- From A Season for the Spirit: Readings for the Days of Lent, by Martin L. Smith, SSJE (pp. 199-200)
I am deeply convicted by these words of Martin Smith.
I am convicted once again when we read the Passion Gospel together, and I cry out with the other members of the frenzied, blood-thirsty crowd, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
I am convicted by some of those other words from Isaiah 53. “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)
What am I convicted of? I am convicted of my own sin, my own turning away from God, and yet of my own desperate need for God. My sin is no less and my need is no less desperate than that of James Harrison and Richard Poplawski and Jiverly Wong and Robert Stewart and Michael McLendon and – closer to home – Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And as Martin Smith says, to the extent that I have trouble praying for any of these people, to the extent that I label them as “them”, as an alien group, to the extent that I do not count them as my brothers and sisters, my own flesh, sinners just like me, desperately in need of a loving, saving God – JUST LIKE ME, EXACTLY LIKE ME – then I have not taken up my cross, as Jesus bids me to do.
CONCLUSION
What if, when we sang “Kyrie Eleison”, we had the people we look at with utter contempt and rage held closely in our minds and in our hearts? What if we tried to see them as our Lord sees them… and us? Seeking, desperate, often hopelessly lost, in need of God’s love and light and forgiveness, and a way back home.
“Walk among them, I’ll go with you.
Reach out to them with your hands.
Suffer with me, and together
We will serve them, help them stand
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.”
Lord, have mercy on us! Christ, have mercy on us! Lord, have mercy on us!
The Good News of Good Friday is that the Lord has had mercy on us. He has already forgiven us – all of us – when he said from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34) We know not what we are doing when we act as if everyone else but us are the sinners of this world, that others somehow need the healing forgiveness and love of God more than we do. And yet, our heavenly Father still forgives us.
On this day – of all days – we cry out, “Lord, have mercy on us!”
And we hear the Lord answer, “I have had mercy on you. I do have mercy on you now. And I will have mercy on you again. For words cannot express how much I love you. Perhaps my going to the cross for you will give you some idea of how much I love you.”
The issue is whether or not we will accept this all-encompassing, unconditional love of God, and allow it to penetrate to the very depths of our souls. If we accept the truth about ourselves… of our deep need for God, and accept another truth – the truth of how deep and how wide and how never-ending is God’s love for us, and how God will stop at nothing to demonstrate that love to us – then this will indeed be an amazingly good Friday.