Sermon on April 10, 2020: Good Friday
Good Friday sermons are the hardest sermons to write, I think. We have listened to the passion narrative according to St. John, starting in the Garden of Gethsemane, continuing with the arrest of Jesus, and his trial before Pilate, when he was whipped and mocked, and then his journey toward the Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha, where he was finally nailed to a cross, where he remained until he died. And now that we have heard the full narrative, I wonder why there is a need for a sermon. Because there is nothing I can say that will add to the story we have just heard. There are no words of comfort available to us in this moment.
There is sometimes a temptation for preachers to try and explain why exactly it was that Jesus, the Son of God, had to suffer and die the most horrific of deaths, so that we might somehow be saved from the consequence of our sins. But to do so, to try and explain the crucifixion, would suggest that suffering has its own logic. “Everything happens for a reason,” as the cliché goes. The idea that suffering that Jesus went through, and by extension the suffering that we experience, is ultimately explainable, if only we could see the whole picture. The assumption that suffering is ultimately meaningful.
We make no such assumption today. It’s almost impossible for us to resist the urge to make sense of suffering, because we can’t bear the thought that it is ultimately senseless. That’s why it’s so easy to give in to a picture of Good Friday that is even more horrific: the idea that God needs blood, whether ours or someone else’s. The idea that God needs a scapegoat, which Jesus was willing to become for our sake. A God who uses suffering to balance the books, as though solving an equation.
But Good Friday is not a day for solving theological equations. It is a day for fixing our eyes upon Jesus, the savior of the world; to behold him upon the cross, who went to the depths of human suffering at the hands of his own creation. Who has become one with us in our suffering, not so that we could understand its meaning, but so that we would know that we are not alone. So that we would know that God is always with us, even in our darkest hour, because God in the flesh knew the suffering of the cross.
We are not alone, and Good Friday proves that this is not a vain notion. This is no cliché. This is the love of God, the Word of God made flesh who came all the way down into the worst of human suffering for us and for our salvation, that we would know that there are no depths to which God would not descend in order to redeem us, that he might draw the whole world to himself.
On Good Friday, we don’t need another clever sermon. We don’t need explanations and rationalizations, to be told that we can make sense of suffering. All we need is to watch and pray. To watch and pray, and to behold the Lamb of God, to behold him who taketh away the sins of the world. There is no greater love than this. There is no greater love.
To the Lamb who sits upon the throne—to him be blessing and honor and glory and might, for ever and ever. Amen.