postID: 7000; title: Good Friday
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
Good Friday
Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Array
(
[date] => 2011-04-22 12:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1011
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2011-04-22 12:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2011-04-22postID: 7000 (Good Friday)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7000; date_type: variable; year: 2011
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7000
displayDates for postID: 7000/year: 2011
Array
(
[0] => 2011-04-22
)
postPriority: 999primaryPost found for date: 2011-04-22 with ID: 7000 (Good Friday)
Good Friday
Array
(
[date] => 2011-04-22 12:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1011
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2011-04-22 12:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2011-04-22postID: 7000 (Good Friday)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7000; date_type: variable; year: 2011
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7000
displayDates for postID: 7000/year: 2011
Array
(
[0] => 2011-04-22
)
postPriority: 999primaryPost found for date: 2011-04-22 with ID: 7000 (Good Friday)
The reading_id [310169] is already in the array.
reading found matching title 'John 19:25-27, 28, 30' with ID: 310170
The reading_id [310170] is already in the array.
reading found matching title 'Matthew 27:46' with ID: 293143
The reading_id [293143] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): Luke 23:34, 43, 46; John 19:25-27, 28, 30; Matthew 27:46
A Sermon by
Canon Andrew Dietsche
on
Luke 23:34, 43, 46; John 19:25-27, 28, 30; Matthew 27:46
✛
Meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ
Array
(
[0] => 60757
[1] => 60758
[2] => 60755
)
book: [60757] (reading_id: 310169)bbook_id: 60757
The bbook_id [60757] is already in the array.
book: [60758] (reading_id: 310170)
bbook_id: 60758
The bbook_id [60758] is already in the array.
book: [Array ( [0] => 60755 ) ] (reading_id: 293143)
bbook_id: 60755
The bbook_id [60755] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
We are a long way from the baptismal waters of Jordan. We are a long way from the carpenter of Galilee who laid down his tools and wandered off to Judea following John the Baptist. And we are a long way from Jesus’ forty day wilderness retreat at the beginning of all things, when he went to be alone with his God, looking for understanding of the purpose God had for his life. Into that silent communion of man and God came the devil himself with various temptations to distract, divert or detour Jesus from his mission. And when the old adversary failed in that effort, he left Jesus until, as it is said, “an opportune time.”
This is the opportune time. It would appear that this is the devil’s hour. The last explosion of chaos and violence before the extinction of Jesus. In the unquestioned victimization of Jesus in these hours, in the unrelenting assault on him by sinful men from the hour of his arrest until his dying, it might seem that he has been left by God to the enemy. It might seem that the powers of evil have been given their day.
But we have come here today to spend time in meditation on the Seven Last Words which Jesus spoke from the cross, and in these words we will see that the God who was a living presence in the very being of this Jesus was yet, and if all that we see is the violence, then we may miss the deeper truth that the searing brutality of this day is only a cheap covering cast over the mighty hand of God.
The Anglican humanist Dorothy Sayers famously wrote long ago that “the people who hanged Christ thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium.”
I will accept that indictment on church and culture, but actually today we who are church have come to look upon the shattering personality unmuffled. Here are the words of astonishing power, words which are utterly transformative, words of saving grace. They will shock us if we are attentive. We draw them from four gospels, and string them together to a semblance of narrative order. That is a legitimate exercise, but in fact each of these words will also stand on its own as an icon of the full redemptive enterprise of God in Christ. And it is as such icons that I want to look at them today, and they begin with this: Father, forgive.
The First Word
Father forgive them; for they know not what they do.
Luke 23:34
And as they led [Jesus] away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus. And there followed him a great multitude of the people, and of women who bewailed and lamented him. … And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments. (Luke 23:26-34)
Who is this who even forgives sin? Who has that right? It was the question of Simon the Pharisee and his dinner guests, and it still looms over the person and the mission of Jesus. The language of forgiveness so pervades Christian discourse that we can forget how shocking the idea was to Jesus’ hearers, and ignore how shocking it remains. Forgiveness violates our requirements of accountability and offends our most basic sense of justice. So it is a good question, and never more important or more difficult than when that forgiveness is offered from the cross by a bleeding, violated and crushed man.
There are two points that I would like to draw from Jesus’ forgiveness. First, they didn’t deserve it, and second, the forgiveness was immediate. Actually, it seems even that the forgiveness preceded the offense. Waited for it. I’m going to discuss that first point, then the second, and then swing back around to see how the second point informs the first.
The people Jesus forgave from the cross didn’t deserve it, but in fact no sins deserve to be pardoned. If they did, then this whole endeavor of our salvation in Christ would be merely contractual. But it is the universal undeservedness of sin that makes forgiveness a scandal. We are suspicious of forgiveness because we get it that if anything can be forgiven, everything must be, and few are any more ready to accept the unconditional sweep of God’s absolving grace than Simon was.
In 1994, Roy Ratcliff, a minister in Wisconsin, went to the state prison where the inmate Jeffrey Dahmer had asked to be baptized. Ratcliff spent enough time with him to discern that he understood what this was about and repented of his crimes, and then he baptized him in the infirmary whirlpool. At once, and for years, Ratcliff was ostracized even by most of the area clergy, widely reviled in his town, lived as a marked man, and bore the shame of his people for what he had done. And why? Because he had raised the stakes in the ongoing Christian concern with repentance and absolution, and people didn’t know if they could go there with him. Or want to. If God can forgive Dahmer, then what would he not? If the cannibalistic serial killer can be forgiven, then what am I to do with those who have offended me — done me some terrible harm or slighted me in some small way?
The temptation of even many who profess this faith is to see the Christian enterprise as a small thing — an easy gospel simply drawing us toward a slightly more expansive spirit, a life of some greater measure of charity, but not to a fundamental change in the very definition of words, of ideas, of the relationships among people, and of the place where people stand before God and history. Or, as Dorothy Sayers said, to surround it with an atmosphere of tedium. This First Word from the cross shatters any such illusions.
So in the face of the scandal of absolution, we must start by noting that those Jesus forgave were not repentant, they articulated no faith, they didn’t want the forgiveness, they would refuse it, they didn’t deserve it, they believed they were in the right, they will make no restitution, they will revile and hate the forgiver, and they would do everything again in a heartbeat. Yet none of that stood in the way of Jesus’ free act of mercy.
Which takes us to my second point. Jesus’ forgave with astonishing immediacy. And I will begin by saying that I have become convinced that the kind of forgiveness we see in Jesus can only happen while the offense itself and the outrage that flows from it are still white hot. I have become convinced of that, even though I am almost always incapable of it. Indeed, I am convinced that it is only when the offense is not only fresh, but alive in its malevolence that true Christlike forgiveness must be offered or it never can be. What we do when we forgive later — when we have wearied of our anger, or when our offender has been punished, or when our adversary comes with apology and in a sense “earns” our pardon — looks so much like forgiveness that we can easily confuse the two.
But this immediate, at-once forgiveness by Jesus is a witness to something less familiar to us. It is a word of tremendous world-shaking power. A word which redefines justice, because it redefines Love.
The assassin of Mohandas Gandhi came to him in 1948 with his hands together before him in the Indian pose of fraternal greeting, but with a pistol hidden between his palms. Judas, would you betray me with a kiss? Witnesses reported that as Gandhi crumpled into the arms of his granddaughters, the bullet in his chest, he raised his fingers to his forehead in the Hindu gesture of forgiveness. He could do that because he was ready. As Jesus was always ready to meet the adversary. And Jesus’ readiness to forgive flowed from the Love of God to which he had inextricably bound himself, so that he could no longer be defined or tossed to and fro by the actions — even sinful, violent actions — of others.
Here is the point: forgiveness is not a response to anything. Rather, it is a gospel way of always being in the world, always making a witness to the Love of God. Jesus’ immediate forgiveness, and Gandhi’s for that matter, reveals that forgiveness is simply the fruit of that deeper virtue which dwells in the soul, always ready, always alive. It is the love of friend and enemy which Jesus commanded us, and that love is the machinery of his power. You can kill me but you cannot make me hate you. Violence and the harm of others by force are a commonplace in this broken world, but they are not power. The true power of God, the power to love, cannot be mitigated or tempered by force. It transcends deserving and undeserving. It transcends even virtue and unvirtue. It seems, and this is the point of Jesus’ First Word, that God loves the wolf no less than the lamb.
So that as the light fades over Golgotha, Jesus’ First Word leaves us with a strange and wondrous image: it is of the devil and all his legions, helplessly flailing away at the unassailable, immutable wall of God’s love. Not God’s love for Jesus. God’s love for them. Amen.
The Second Word
Today Shalt Thou be with Me in Paradise.
Luke 23:43
One of the criminals who were hanged railed at [Jesus], saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:39-43)
There was a reason that Jesus was crucified between two criminals: Because Jesus was a criminal, found guilty in a court of law. He was not sent out to die with two thieves in order to humiliate him, but because while he stood before Pilate, they stood before their judges, and their executions were just the ordinary work of the day for Pilate’s soldiers. This crucifixion is for us the central act of human history, but on the day it happened it was no big deal. And so we should also not forget that there was nothing remarkable about these two criminals. They were ordinary bad guys. By tradition they are contrasted as the Good Thief and the Bad Thief. That shorthand no doubt does little justice to the complexity of either man, but their importance to our story is less about who they were than who Jesus was to them.
The affirmation of Jesus by the Good Thief has led to much speculation about him, nothing of which can be supported from the text. But we have this one thing, that from his own place of torture and dying he defended Jesus’ innocence as over against his own guilt and the guilt of the other thief, and also implied an acceptance of or belief in Jesus’ kingdom. In response, Jesus assured him, promised him, that they would be that day together in paradise, which is our Second Word. To the Bad Thief Jesus said nothing, and it is that which interests me here.
When we call one thief Good and the other Bad, and when we hear a word of Jesus to one and not the other, our conventional wisdom quickly jumps to the easiest, least challenging, lightest-lifting path of least resistance, and assumes that if Jesus told the thief who gave the right answer that he would be with him in paradise but said nothing to the thief who got it wrong, then it must be that the word spoken to the Good Thief does not apply to the Bad. It must mean that the Bad Thief has disqualified himself for salvation.
Just so, many a preacher has asked from the pulpit, “Are you the Good Thief or the Bad Thief?” And the experience of a lifetime of arbitrary rewards and punishments has taught every child that “if you’re good you go to heaven and if you’re bad you go to hell,” and for all our years whenever the conditions of life are particularly difficult we revert right back to that simple default. And this one’s easy. Even in extremity the Good Thief understood and saw the possibilities and saw Jesus in truth and made something approaching a confession of faith. The Bad Thief was blinded to what was happening right before him — indeed, happening to him — and stayed stuck in his vile and ignorant ranting. So for two millennia we have called one Good and one Bad, and no one cares about the Bad Thief or should. No one maybe but Jesus.
And I am going to think that Jesus did. Because when I hear the Good Thief’s defense of Jesus, and hear Jesus’ gracious reply, I am reminded that this is the same rabbi who said that “if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” And when I hear only Jesus’ silence in response to the Bad Thief’s reviling, I am reminded that this is the one who said to “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” And I remember that he said “Resist not the evildoer.”
I think that Jesus’ answer to the Good Thief, the one who saw and understood, was a simple kind of acknowledgement of a truth. He said to the Good Thief what the Good Thief seems to have needed to hear.
You will remember that a dozen years ago or so Karla Faye Tucker was executed in Texas for a savage crime. But she had become a converted Christian while on death row and was by all accounts remorseful and repentant and had used her remaining time to do good and make what amends she could. When she appealed for her life that appeal was joined by politicians and world leaders of every ideology, and by religious leaders of every tradition, from the pope to television evangelists. But behind this worldwide appeal seemed to lurk a sentiment that she was worth saving because she had become a Christian. She was one of us.
What struck me at the time, though, was that six days later another execution took place in Texas. Steven Renfro. Another vicious killer. He made no appeal for his life, but accepted his sentence, and not one person argued on his behalf. But before he was killed I heard a scrap of an interview with him, and I have not forgotten what he said: “I know I can’t get to heaven, but maybe I can get part way there.” I heard that and I thought, “that’s pretty good.”
Maybe Karla Faye Tucker was the Good Thief and maybe Steven Renfro was the Bad Thief. We trust that Tucker in her genuine remorse and faith in Christ will receive her reward. But far more interesting are those struggling, blind souls, unable to see the brilliance of the gift offered — the outstretched hand — who have intimations of heaven without confidence in it. Who would turn maybe to Christ but don’t know how, and not knowing how, afraid to hope, instead reject, curse, deny and deride. That sounds like Steven Renfro, but can we also assume that of the Bad Thief on the cross?
Is there a place in paradise for one who even in his own dying on the cross, can look over and damn his partner in death? More interesting yet are those who do see Christ clearly and choose against him. Who understand the choice and choose death. Can it be that Christ has a place even for them? Jesus calls us, invites us, to enlist into the great company of the saints but is it also possible to be drafted for salvation? “He made the whole creation new.” Maybe the resurrection of Jesus, which is ours too through him, is not just some kind of salvific problem-solving or sorting-out. Maybe it is the new Big Bang.
I cannot look upon one who is nailed to the same cross as Christ, — undergoing the same dying, with the same weight of suffering, condemned by the same court and mocked by the same crowd — and who even so spits contempt toward Jesus, having no doubt to stretch his neck around his broken, bleeding arms to deliver his venom, and not see the purest expression of self loathing possible. This cannot simply be an attack on Jesus, though it is that. We have also to see this as the final, despairing scream of a dying man who has no thought of his own life but that he hates it, no account to make but one of defeat, failure and dishonor. Regret that he was born. It is to himself that he hollers You Deserve This. And I cannot believe that to one backed into such a dark and dangerous corner God cannot cast the eye of compassion and immortal love.
Why did Jesus make the promise he did to the Good Thief? Because it was the true, simple and direct response to the blessing offered him by the thief.
But why did Jesus have nothing to say to the Bad Thief? Why could he give no last-minute assurance to the Bad Thief that if not the promise then at least the possibility, the hope, of a grace sufficient to the task of his salvation could be within the strength of God? To say a single word to the Bad Thief that paradise too, and the love of God, and the forgiveness of God, and the wholeness and breadth and perfection of God’s own vision of God’s own kingdom might also be for him — now in his living and dying — that Jesus might penetrate the dark and opaque veil of the rushing, hurrying death that all three of them were already in the process of dying and find that rarely visited place deep within the Bad Thief that still had an ear to hear.
Why could Jesus not now in the final last minutes of his life and the lives of the thieves who share his day and his history have a single word of hope for this the least and most reviled of all God’s creatures?
Maybe it is because after a life — and now especially after a three year missionary venture of traveling, eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, walking, running, riding, laughing, weeping, sighing, sharing, caring, daring, healing, revealing, preaching, teaching, reaching, beseeching, exorcising, giving, forgiving, exhorting, encouraging, laboring, touching, watching, waiting, seeing, being, doing, hoping, blessing, caressing, confessing, fearing, hearing, cheering, wishing, fishing, wanting, worrying, hurrying, scurrying, praying and praising, and now finally even living and dying among betrayers and deniers, liars, cheaters, adulterers, brigands and robbers, apostates, pagans, heathens, foreigners and strangers, outlaws, lepers, tax collectors, thugs, cut-throats, whores and whoremongers, and every kind of sinner — after all that, and for one crucified, dying preacher with that kind of account to present — it went without saying. Amen.
Woman, Behold Thy Son! … Behold Thy Mother!
John 19:25-27
Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (John 19:25-27)
This is Mary’s Mount Moriah moment. This is Mary at the sacrifice of her son on a spur of the same mountain on which Abraham bound Isaac with rope, laid him over a stone altar and came on him with his knife. The father of one and the mother of another, shockingly ready to offer sacrifice of first sons to a God who required it. It is in this moment that we look into the eyes of Mary and see the wildness within.
The evangelist John tells us that Jesus looked down from the cross to his mother, and to the Beloved Disciple. And he gave them to each other, which is his Third Word. We can read this as the final, loving act of a caring son who can no longer protect his widowed mother, and of course it is that. But if by that we imagine that Mary was helpless or fearful we must be sure that we see not the Mary of scripture but the Mary created later by a sentimentalizing church and culture.
One cannot think of Mary at the end without remembering her at the beginning. She is the only figure other than Jesus himself who ties together the first things and the last. She is the only one at mangerside who remains to stand at the cross. It is she who at the beginning was warned by ancient Simeon at the temple that a sword would pierce her heart. And now here she is at Golgotha. And now here is that sword, running her clean through. Mary is the continuity. She first before any in the world heard the promise of messianic redemption from the angel and was witness from the first day to the last.
John never names her. In Matthew and Mark she is a supporting player. It is Luke, perhaps because he was an artist, perhaps because we believe he knew her, who draws the fullest picture of the mother of Christ. And in his story of the young Mary we will understand something more about this person who now comes to the place of Jesus’ dying.
There was a day when the word of God came to Mary — it is said by means of the visitation of the archangel — to tell her that she was to conceive a child by the Holy Spirit. We know very little of Mary’s life from scripture. but Luke takes great pains in ways implicit and explicit to demonstrate that Mary and Joseph were impoverished. She gave birth to Jesus while they were hapless pilgrims on the road, among people who had no place for them, and laid him in the fetid straw of a feeding trough. The witnesses were shepherds and brigands. At Jesus’ presentation in the temple they requested and received the poverty exemption, allowed by law to those who could demonstrate that they could not afford the required sacrifice. Even that child would lament one day that foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. Their lives are shown to us as weakness before power, helplessness before authority. They lived as the poor always live, with little claim on the world, little mark to leave behind. They lived under the power of others, by the leave of others.
Luke goes to great pains to reveal glimpses of the small and large humiliations that are the daily bread of the poor. That the poor have endured in every place and every age, even in our own day in our own city, played out in the drama of this small family. And when we read those humiliations and privations and dismissals into the story of Mary’s poverty we will also read there the exhaustion of it, the weariness of the human spirit that sometimes wells up as longing.
So that when Mary was told that she would bear the long-awaited child she responded not in the excited or charming anticipation of impending motherhood, but out of the hope rising within her that now, at long last, the injustices and inequities of his world, which have been her own story, will be resolved. From that young woman in that moment rang out the anthem which is Magnificat:
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel.
He hath. He hath. For one who could sing this song, how could it be otherwise than that from that day Mary lived in certainty that the promises made to her by God were already true. Lived as though they had been fulfilled. Lived even then in the time to come, the Day of the Lord. Mary could be certain of the future because it is God’s future, certain that the world is already just because God’s promise of justice has already been spoken within it.
This is the undoing of the prince of this world. The passionate declaration of a poor girl who has seen and heard in God’s messianic announcement the justice which all needful people have always sought.
Mary’s song overturns any understanding of the Nativity as a charming story of a young woman and her holy child. And that informs everything we could ever know about her. It certainly counters any understanding that the figure of Mary at the foot of the cross is no more than the sentimental picture of maternal grief — the pieta, the Mother of Sorrows. She is that certainly, but for longer even than Jesus himself, Mary has carried the hope born on Christmas, pondering the testimony of shepherds and angels in her heart, waiting for the fulfillment of promises once made to her by God himself.
Despite Simeon’s warning, she could not have known that it would end in this way in this place with this dying. But she had to know that any such overturning of the powers of this world was going to be a rough ride. She had to know that when the Messiah was revealed the adversary would turn back on him in rage and spite and with the full power he possessed — the power to lay everything to waste — to extinguish his word, his witness, his life from this earth.
In these chaotic explosions of violence on Mount Moriah, Abraham on his day and Mary on hers learned something about themselves that God already knew. That they loved their sons but loved God more. That they would give all the world for theirs sons but would trade them for an idea, a hope, a glimpse of God’s own future. And learned that they were more than ready, always ready, to fling themselves into that future come what may.
Eyes which once were bathed in angel light are now assaulted by sweat, tears, and stinging grit. A face, young and unlined when it was washed by the beating of angel wings, is now roughly re-shaped and carved by care and age but flashes contempt and defiance and no scrap of fear back at Caiaphas and Pilate, at the soldiers, at Caesar of Rome even.
Through the whirling smoke and the blowing dust of Calvary, I see Mary come striding with strong and purposeful steps to the cross of her son, her uplifted face of stern and set jaw, her bright, excited eyes staring back into the dimming eyes of Jesus — mother and son as co-victors in a common battle. This was the reason. This was why he had swelled within her body three decades earlier. This was what the angel had said, so what would she say now in this hour — I’ve changed my mind? I will after all accept the injustices and indignities and inequities of this world? Will she admit and see now that the cost of God’s kingdom is just too high?
No. This is a mother glad for the dying. Triumphant in the suffering. Victorious in her sorrows. This mother will say as her son said: It is for this reason that I came to this hour. And look with weathered fierce gaze up into the blood-smeared mask of her dying son and say along with him, mouthing the words together as conquerers: It is finished!
To the one who on a different and merrier day sang that Canticle — who gave poetic voice to the demands of a world in which most people do not have enough to eat or drink, in which most people live under the power of others and are never safe, and all people are bound up in the tightening noose of inhumanity and all that is unredeemed — Jesus nows gives as her child the new-borning Church.
So let us not see that Jesus’ statements to his mother and to his disciple are only his tying up loose ends before dying. They are, but are not only or even mostly, the tender concern of a dying son for his aging mother. Rather, this is an act of community organizing. To that woman, who bore God within her, who heard, accepted and embraced — who believed — the vision of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, the Church will be her child. The Church and its disciples will see in her unwavering visage the mother of their desires, the maternal nurturer of a pentecostal faith of furious mission. Amen.
The Fourth Word
My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?
Matthew 27:46
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, la’ma sabach-tha’ni?” that is, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “This man is calling Elijah.” And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink. (Matthew 27:45-49)
This Fourth Word is the first verse of the 22nd psalm, and it is possible simply to imagine that in his distress, Jesus, so familiar with scripture, would find those few words coming to his lips as the natural expression of his anguish. But Jesus’ invoking of that first verse suggests that to understand him we might read the whole psalm. And the first twentyone verses of the psalm are a literal and wrenching description of Jesus’ own torment: I am poured out like water; All my bones are out of joint; Packs of dogs close me in; They pierce my hands and gloat over me. But there is more to the psalm than that.
It is a liturgical convention to place this as the middle Word of the seven, but it does seem to be a word which rises from deep suffering. It is not the expression of first pain. Nor his last testament. Rather, this is the despair that wells up from the midst of an endured torture. As the suffering drags on. No end in sight. Hope of deliverance waning. That those on whom one might count have turned away. One is forgotten.
I remember from my long ago days in Chicago the haunting image on the facade of the Church of the Ascension in that city. It is Christ on the cross, in his agony, and the words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?” It is arresting to pass by, thinking ordinary thoughts, and to suddenly confront not only the image of the torment of Jesus, but also the pointed question, the indictment of indifference and uncaring in the face of it.
In a sense, that question — is it nothing to you — is the question put to God by Jesus. Why have you forsaken me? It is also the question put to God by every person who suffers alone, afraid, in the dark, or at the hands of others. Whose lives end in ways that are not meaningful, which contain no redemption. It is the question from people who fall back into shadow, looking for heavenly light but seeing only the falling darkness. We ask it too, when it seems that human life is not simply ending, as it must, but is being thrown away, wasted, lost. Where is God? Ten years ago in September in this city that question was asked in every street.
These words of abandonment by a lost and forgotten soul echo in every age as the scandal of our mortal condition — the humiliation and insult of death — that the wonderful, grace-filled lives iridescent with thoughts, dreams, hopes, loves and every wonder, all given us as gift by God for our living in this beautiful Garden of Eden are finally thrown away like the garbage they become.
Jesus quoted the psalter. And it is tempting to see that as a strategy on his part, a way of conveying a preaching word to his witnesses. A way of drawing them toward a theological, scripturally-significant way of understanding his suffering and his dying. And I am willing to grant that, but not if that means that we will diminish or dilute or deny what is very clearly Jesus’ own personal shattering, crushing sense, belief, awareness and shock that he is falling out of life into death, out of light into darkness, while his very real experience within that horror is of having been written off by God.
And let us also not succumb to the temptation of imagining that because Jesus never stopped being God even as he never stopped being a man, and that this figure on the cross is both mortal man and immortal God, that somehow all of this is just a passion play and not a passion, and that it is a logical impossibility that the God in Jesus could forsake or abandon his own self. That is an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin kind of theology, and because it robs the torture and actual very real dying of Jesus of its reality and therefore its power is at least insulting.
So let us leave Jesus where we find him — where God flang him — in what appears to be dreadful despair, and by falling into that deep abyss — leaping into that outer darkness — with him, see that there may be a teaching in this fourth word and the utter human despair and loneliness it seems to express far more exhilarating than any attempt on the part of any person or any argument to mitigate it.
There is a name given by doctors to infants who are not touched, caressed, held, loved, doted on, cared about. Infants who do not look up expectantly to human faces, who do not smile, laugh, reach out to others. Who listlessly turn their face to the wall. They call it Failure to Thrive. These do not cry out. In their short lives they have learned that when they cry no one will come, when they are needful no one responds. They have learned that they may make no claim. Though the condition is heartbreaking, I am terribly moved by the term, because it reminds us that our natural and expected state of being is thriving.
I believe that to stand in the darkest recess of the abyss, to be lost in the frozen waste of outer darkness, and even there still cry out to God, even if that cry is a lament, even an indictment of the fact and challenge of forsakenness, is great thriving. To claim love when there is no evidence for it. To say my God my God when there is no God. This is hope when hope is the work of profound trust.
For Jesus to declare that he is forsaken is to make a claim on God. It is to assert, to present and argue his case, that he has known the love of God as a lived reality. If it has disappeared, if it cannot be seen or known, if it has been taken away and is no longer, nevertheless it was known. It was real. To declare forsakenness is to make a case, and state one’s claim before all the world when there is no scrap of evidence for it: I have known the love of God, and I may make my claim on him!
On the previous evening, Jesus was betrayed by Judas. Betrayed by him. There is a singular fact about betrayal which we would be wise to remember when we read that account. And that is that betrayal is the one sin we reserve for those we love the dearest. It is the offense we impose on no one else except those who are the closest to us in the world, who have a right to something more, something better. We cannot betray anyone who has no right to make a claim on us. I cannot betray the next stranger who might wander down the street, for that person and I have no history, no expectations of one another. But God knows my own children have every right to make a claim on me and so I can absolutely betray them. And have. That the word betrayal is applied to what happens between Judas and Jesus is so powerful and so shattering that I have entertained the thought that the unnamed Beloved Disciple of the fourth gospel can only be Judas. For who except the most beloved could turn the knife?
In the early morning hours Peter denied Jesus. This would mean nothing if not for the bond which Jesus and Peter already shared. After all their common history, and the miles of hard-traveled road behind them that brought them to this place, to deny Jesus was the most painful affront. It was indifference when Jesus needed good faith. Jesus had a right to make a claim on Peter, and he did.
In exactly the same way, when Jesus looks out through blood-stung eyes into the dying light and cries out his abandonment by God — his forsakenness — he expresses that from which we often demure. He says to God what he had a right to say to Judas, to Peter. That in the fact of communion and covenant there are mutual expectations, mutual accountabilities. God may and does make claims on us. And so may we on God. So must we.
From the recesses of the pit Jesus cries out to God his lament. He cries the name of one he does not believe to be listening but cries his name nonetheless. He makes his claim.
After verse after verse of horrors, the psalm which Jesus invoked comes back around. “To him even the dead bow down,” it says. “Even dead, I will live for him.” To say that and believe it, looking out onto a violent and loveless world through eyes dimming with fast-approaching death — “Even dead, I will live for him” — is a heroic faith. Faith chipping at the stone monolith of the silence of God. This is the very antithesis of despair.
Though you abandon me to thugs, though dogs tear at my legs and carrion birds at my flesh, though I look for you and you are not there, cry out for you and you do not answer, though you forsake me in my last hour: Even so, I forget you not. Amen.
The Fifth Word
I Thirst.
John 19:28
After this Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfil the scripture), “I thirst.” A bowl full of vinegar stood there; so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth. (John 19:28-29)
In their secretive late-night meeting, Jesus asked the inquiring pharisee Nicodemus, “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” I think of that question in the context of this Fifth Word from the cross, because we seem here to have the prosaic and the wonderful, the earthy and the heavenly, intermingled in Jesus’ expression. And it may be that thinking of the links from the earthly to the heavenly will help us to understand what Jesus was about.
When we come to “I Thirst,” we are not immediately sure what to do with it, how to treat it. It just seems too prosaic, speaking only of Jesus’ physical need as his crucifixion dragged on into the afternoon. Indeed, this Word does, more than the others, force us to think about and consider the exact nature of crucifixion — the specific ways in which this form of execution torture the person in indescribable ways over many hours or even days before they come to their end. In our last meditation we heard Jesus invoke the twenty-second psalm to describe his anguish. And we might now return to that horrific description of suffering and read these words too: “My mouth is dried out like a pot-sherd; my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth.”
Indeed.
For Jesus to give voice to his suffering is understandable, but if that is all this is, most preachers will not know what to do with it. Among these several statements of profound spiritual and theological import, that Jesus would interject to simply ask for water feels like an interruption rather than a continuance of his redemptive proclamations. It seems somehow unimportant.
So the temptation of every preacher is to at once allegorize these words and suggest that what Jesus really speaks of is his thirst for God, or his thirst for the righteousness and peace, or his thirst for the salvation of his people. That is legitimate, and certainly we have seen and continue to see in Jesus all of these passions, these thirsts. And in the Gospel of John, from which these verses are taken, the word “thirst” means something more every time, and always points to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, always points to Living Water.
But I would like to suggest that the simple, prosaic and physical meaning of these words, and the allegorical interpretation of them, are all of one piece. They are expressions of a single desire. The desire for water and the desire for Living Water are both of them the desire for life. To live now in the time of this mortal body and to live eternally in the presence and love and light of God. These are earthly things, and they are heavenly, and as Jesus said to Nicodemus, the understanding of both requires the exercise of belief.
At Jacob’s Well Jesus told the woman who came to draw water that he had other water, water that will for any who drink become a deep well of Living Water within, and that person will thirst no more. The woman’s response was to ask for that water, and it is supposed that she did not understand him. But perhaps that is unfair. It could be that she saw very clearly and for the first time that if the deepest hopes and longings of her complicated and broken life were to finally be satisfied or answered, if the questions that torment her were to finally be met by truth — that is, that if this woman who knows no peace were to receive the quenching grace of a redeemed life in God — then maybe the every-single-day needs, wants and desires that consume her imagination and toss her to and fro and seem to burn so lustily would be seen for what they are and cease to have power over her. Could she see that Jesus was telling her that every human longing, every aspiration, every desired thing is the expression of a deeper spiritual need within us which is incomplete or unfulfilled?
Some months ago I passed a church in the Catskills, and on their sign on the lawn was this counsel: “Give your worries to God; he’ll be up all night anyway.” And indeed, to God flows in a continual torrent the innumerable prayers of his people. A flood of supplication for redress from every human need, relief from every pain, repair of every broken life. Prayers for dignity, health, reconciliation or good fortune; for love or forgiveness or assistance; for life, for others who suffer, for peace in the world. All of this is the profoundest work of the human spirit. Even the seemingly trivial prayers people murmur in the course of a day to ease, however briefly, the burdens and complications of life — let me pass my algebra test; help me lose five more pounds before the wedding — have a poignant and important foundation.
For all of these desires and needs point to something beyond themselves. They are the presenting issues of a deeper human condition. God has placed within us the desire for himself, and in our lives we will strive to satisfy that desire, though without always being able to name it. But if we do not understand the real nature of the prosaic earthly needs that occupy all of our lives and time we will never understand the heavenly things to which they point. Jesus said so. And in the same way if we do not hear and heed the one who calls us to streams of Living Water, we will never stop trying to drown all the voices in our head with the ordinary stuff. And never see the earthly-things-heavenly-things connections that Jesus tried to explain to Nicodemus.
For example, you may remember that some years ago Volvo ran a television commercial in which a handsome and rugged man drove his car deep into the forest. There he stood on the roof of his car as cool rain fell upon him from the branches above. The tag line said, “Finally, a car that can save your soul.” There was an outcry, and the ad was taken off the air pretty quickly, but I was sorry to see it go. I’d never before seen a commercial that told the truth so nakedly, one that said what everyone was already thinking but was afraid to say.
Jesus told Nicodemus to listen to him about earthly things, so he would understand them for the small things they are and he would then be able to hear the truth of heavenly things. In an unabashedly consumerist and materialist culture we never do stop running out of things to buy or invent to throw into that need within us that wants satisfaction, but the real tragedy of our human condition is that while Nicodemus’ soul and ours too will be crying out for reunion with God, often as not we will settle for a Volvo.
Jesus lived with no such confusions. His love for this world and everything and everyone in it is the unbroken thread the gospel, but every good thing and every person was for him also a sign of the love and mercy of God shining through in all his glory.
I was moved to read the words of John Savant of Dominican University who spoke of the passions which marked the several years since the death of his beloved wife. “I have felt myself being drawn beyond myself,” he wrote, “by an enormous hunger; but, strangely, this hunger does not seek her return in the flesh. It is a hunger not attributable to atom or molecule, flesh or bone. I have come to see its origin and its object as absolute beauty, pure goodness, justice without flaw; as the mind’s resting place in truth.”
Beauty. Goodness. Justice. Truth. These are the good things of God, and after all else has passed away, this is what satisfies, and quenches real thirst. And so did Jesus believe, and so did he teach.
And yet:
In our last meditation we considered how Jesus, in the darkest hour of his lonely agony, in the face of despair’s hollow victory, called out his claim on God, his final exclamation of trust that God is still God. Now we see that trust give voice to desire. But I do not believe that in this last passage of Jesus’ life, in the tortured moment, he suddenly began throwing out allegories. I believe that when Jesus said “I Thirst” it was because he was in a body and his body was dying, and among the cascading catastrophes of that dying was that he was parched.
In myriad ways throughout the gospels Jesus has spoken of the human desire for God, that desire which has been his whole life’s principle and even now in the extreme hour of his life is burning within him. He has spoken of this longing in parables and stories and in countless poetic and powerful ways, astonishing in the beauty of his witness. But perhaps with iron spikes through his limbs, and pack animals tearing at his legs, and his bones pulling from their sockets, and his eyes full of blood, and all of his exhaustion and suffocation and searing pain, the poetry has died in his throat.
Gandhi said once that there are people so poor that they can only see God in a loaf of bread. In the same way, perhaps Jesus, whose sole longing is to return to the Father, can only see him now in a cup of water. And the earthly points to the heavenly, as Jesus just asks the people right in front of him for what he needs right now: something to drink. Amen.
The Sixth Word
It is Finished.
John 19:30
When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, “It is finished”; and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (John 19:30)
When my father-in-law died, I found myself alone with him in the middle of the night as we awaited the undertakers. Lewis had an extraordinary life, though not an easy one, and stories from that life had long entertained his daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren. I looked upon him and thought, “that long picaresque story is over.” And it seemed that only now that he was gone could his life be considered and vested with coherence, and understood for what it was. Now could the chapters and seasons of his life be seen as a single narrative, with a beginning and an end, and everything in between essential components of the whole. Nothing wasted, everything to a purpose.
Our lives are made up of things that we do and things that happen to us, careful plans and unforeseen circumstances, myriad crossroads, and at every turn we must make choices and decisions, and most of the time we get to do that in freedom. We may choose well or not, but rarely can we see how those decisions once made will reshape our whole lives to come. But they all do. When we get old and look back, we see how every decision made along the way had to be made in exactly the way it was or we would not be where we are, we would not be who we are. Somehow in the course of our living we were spinning a thread, the thread of our life’s inner logic. And maybe only in reflection can we see that thread shining as a continuous bright line through all of the changes and chances through which we lived. And see that that line — the thread we spun — had to inevitably bring us to this very moment.
Jesus’ crucifixion is an account of extreme violence, from his arrest through his deposition from the cross. In all these hours there is never a time when Jesus is not captive to others, never a time when he is not subject to the will and the caprice of others. Never when he is not the victim of the brutality of other people. However the idea that one who contains within his being the full divinity of God could be helpless to human sin and violence is scandalous to us, and so our reading of these texts begs a very important question: Did Jesus lay down his life or was it taken from him? There is substantial evidence for the latter — this is an execution, after all — but there are intimations of the former, and this Sixth Word is just such an intimation.
I am not sure, however, that viewing these stories as either the shifting fortunes in the affairs of people, or as the scripted, foreordained unfolding of God’s specific intentions does justice to Jesus’ perfect freedom in choosing for God, nor to the free choices made by his adversaries either, nor to the quality of self-offering sought by God.
I would like to suggest instead that when we see the fullness of the love of God revealed by and through a human life of constancy and fidelity in a world of searing sin and injustice, we will also see that certain ends become inevitable, and that inevitability will arise equally out of the free choices made by people and the perfect will of God.
Golgotha comes at the end of a long journey. Literally, over the roads of Galilee and Judea, but it was a long spiritual journey as well. When Jesus first responded to the beckoning call of God and, as Abraham had once done, “went from his country and kindred and his father’s house” to embark on the mission of his life, he could not possibly have seen the destiny to which this course would bring him. And yet those first steps, taken in freedom, were essential to this ultimate passion and the salvation that would be born out of it.
Throughout Jesus’ ministry we can see that God’s plan of salvation was enmeshed with the real human choices and decisions of Jesus. When he waded into the Jordan to accept baptism, that was something he discovered on his own he needed to do. As when he retreated to the desert waste. And we see that free will of Jesus all the way up to and including his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.
But I believe that the longer Jesus lived into his mission, his deep conviction to bind himself to the love of God kept pushing him forward until, and maybe only in these very hours, he could see the hard destiny to which this road was bringing him, revealed as a terrible inevitability. Maybe only in these hours could he see fully that those who commit themselves to God and live their lives utterly in accord with the principles of godly love will find the wrath of the Prince of this World turned against them with great prejudice. Just like this. With scorching violence. This was he, after all, who told the young man that no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of heaven. The free choice is to take up the plow at all. But once the blade is dropped into the furrow, that furrow only goes in one direction, and the way will teach you the way.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was safely in this city, teaching at Union Seminary, when he concluded that he could never again preach the gospel in his home country if he did not return to share the history of his people. So he took the Number One Subway to the Chelsea Piers, where he boarded a ship for Nazi Germany. And I think that when he first set his foot on the subway platform his hanging at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp became inevitable. And I am confident that in some recess of his being he knew that, agreed to it, and went back to Germany looking for the rope he could not find in New York.
On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King confessed to the striking garbage workers of Memphis quite wistfully of his desire for long life, but told them too of the “sick white brothers” who sought his life. That night he recommitted himself to God’s purpose for him — “I just want to do God’s will … I’m not fearing any man!” — and the next day he made his martyrdom. That bullet was the inevitable cost of his gospel witness and he saw it coming and stepped up to it.
Just so Janani Luwum in Uganda and Oscar Romero in El Salvador and a great cloud of witnesses — men and women whose names you and I will never know — chose in hard places and times to bind themselves to the love of God in Christ and lived the gospel with such integrity and constancy that the forces of this world finally mounted up and came for them. And at the last, with the tramping of soldiers’ boots outside their doors and the shouting of men and the ringing out of gunshots and the barking of dogs they could see finally that the lives they had gladly given over to the service of Christ had brought them to this moment, and they accepted their ends. Accepted the inevitability.
All of these, and even — and this is my point — Jesus too, paid the cost of their witness when it was required of them, and I am confident could then see how all of the judgments and commitments and decisions of their lives had led to a moment, and accept with gladness that that moment — terrible in its ferocity, unbearable in its costliness — then became the purpose of their lives. Their meaning. For people to make such choices in utter freedom, but bound by such love that they might even become or be seen to be a manifestation of the divine will, is how the purposes of God get done. When Jesus did that, God saved the world.
The cross is high and gives much perspective. I like to imagine that only from there could Jesus look back down from Golgotha along the road into Jerusalem, and through the city and back out the gates he had entered just days before, on to Bethany, and the roads, towns and villages of Judea, and across mountains to Galilee and the coastal cities, to a home and carpenter shop in Nazareth where he first set his foot and his face on a new mission. And now could see the bright line, and the essential logic of his life and purpose. Maybe only now could he see that this cross was always waiting for him. Every choice along the way, every time, the choice for God, until the thread of his life could lead no where else. “It is finished.”
Jesus’ life was taken from him by people of authority who seized him and had him in their power and did with him as they chose. He was held in the hard grip of soldiers, then tied and manacled and led here and there like an animal. Whipped like an animal. And finally stapled to the wood by nails driven through is flesh. Let us hear no sigh of resignation in this, Jesus’ Sixth Word, but the sweet peace of one who has been given to know that he has plowed the furrow to its end, he has accomplished before the eyes of God the purpose of his life. Then Jesus took the only thing he had left, his very life, and he laid it down in freedom, on purpose, in peace. Amen.
The Seventh Word
Father, Into Thy Hands I Commend My Spirit.
Luke 23:46
It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, and said, “Certainly this man was innocent!” And all the multitudes who assembled to see the sight, when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts. And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance and saw these things. (Luke 23:44-49)
In my living room we have a very heavy bronze sculpture on an onyx base, created by the artist Jack Zajac. He called it “Bound Goat Santa Cruz.” He made it in 1981, at which time he had been fashioning these goats for some thirty years. They were called Easter Goat, or Sacrificial Goat, or Goat on a Stake. And many, like ours, Bound Goat.
It is a goat, tortured, twisted, a tangle of legs, neck straining for release. It is temple sacrifice. Even if Zajac had made no others like this it would be striking. But what fascinates me is that he spent decades coming back again and again, countless times, to this same image. Bound and tormented goats, goats impaled on stakes. And others in the same series: Christ impaled on stakes, or the Crucifixion, with the dying Christ thrusting skyward from from his cross. All are images of violence, yet all are images of wondrous beauty.
“This sculpture series,” he said, “came from drawings I made in 1955-1956 when I was caught up in the dramatic possibility of man confronted with death, or his resistance to the urgings of death and of his final acceptance of it. What may seem on the surface to be a morbid preoccupation is actually a reflection of my feelings that life is most clearly seen in the final moments when death must be considered.”
I think of this artist, his hands forced deep into clay, the sparks of molten bronze as red as the sun scarring his arms. I think of the tremendous physicality of decades spent throwing his body and his creative energies into consideration of the last moment, the last gasps, of Jesus’ life.
But we also return with every Sunday celebration to receive Jesus’ body and blood, we cycle back with every Lenten sojourn, and every Good Friday contemplation of that same moment, to pause with Jesus at that threshold between life and death, death and life — the movement through birth, death and resurrection.
Zajac gave over his art to the study of that moment, in which, as he says, “death must be considered,” and when life is most clearly seen. What may we clearly see in the final moment’s of Jesus’ life? These Last Words give much to consider. And perhaps now in this Seventh Word, in the moment in which Jesus’ death must be considered, see clearly also his life. And what this reveals may depend greatly on how we hear, in the ear of our mind, the great cry, and the a loud voice that commits his soul to God.
In our human lives, lives in which loss, grief and suffering are commonplace, we will always be moved to see the terrible events of Good Friday as fundamentally tragic. We may even see in the trials of Jesus, and of those who remained with him, echoes of the sorrows of our own lives. Unbearable sorrows. And why would we not? It is not only Christ on the cross. In him we see all of the violence done by people to people, all of the inhumanity of which humans are capable, flung with vicious fury at the innocent man. On the cross Jesus received the full assault of all that people do to one another.
So that we may see there with him the little children whose mother drove them into the Hudson River last week. Or the victims of the Long Island serial killer whose long-lost bodies are just now being gathered back in. Or the the poor men and women, weary of years of oppression, rising up in hope in Libya, many into the gunsights of soldiers. Here is the child in Afghanistan who picks up a forgotten cluster mine and loses both legs and an arm. The soldiers falling one after another after another in ten years of constant war. The beaten, broken wife and terrified child hiding from the raging tyrant in their own house. The homeless man asleep in the filth of the subways on which we ride. The impoverished family trading coupons for canned corn at the food pantry. The suicide alone in the dark.
In one of Martin Buber’s more famous Hasidic stories, he tells of a small community of Eastern European Jews hiding from Nazi soldiers in a cemetery, and of the time when a young women in their group came to give birth. They took her for shelter down into an open grave, and there she delivered her child. This was so upsetting a circumstance that the people wondered what it might mean. Until their rabbi concluded that this child must be the messiah, for who but the messiah would be born in a grave?
Jesus, born in a feeding trough, comes to take our every unspeakable tragic loss, and all of our human suffering, and the poignancy, heartbreak and heroism of the human condition, and the high cost of mortal living and dying, and the graves in which we are born, into the very heart of God through his own acceptance of suffering (our suffering) and dying (our dying) on the cross. Through him, human death has become part of the lived experience of our gracious, forgiving and compassionate God. On that alone is our every human hope. We must never blink nor look away from this horror, for it is our redemption.
Yet I am certain that we will fail to understand the significance of this passion if we do not see here beyond the blood, the anguish and the dying also the unfolding of Jesus’ utter joy. Of course we see: there is the tangle of broken legs, here is the straining neck, before us is the twisted and impaled form. But if we ask what we may learn from Jesus’ final moment, then let us also hear, now at the last, the shout of victory and the joyful exclamation as Jesus handed his spirit over to God. What else could so amaze the Centurion? Only the most unexpected thing: exultant joy from one passing straightaway into death.
For this is the Passover of Our Lord. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! By this dying death is undone. By this dying all graves are opened and all souls rise. It is God’s victory, Christ’s triumph! And thus we call this Friday good. In this Seventh Word I believe we see Jesus die with the same joy with which he lived, and as we take our leave from Golgotha let us not overlook that this last thrilling declaration is Jesus’ final testimony before his rising.
When I began this series a few hours ago, I suggested that while the Seven Last Words of Christ can be threaded together as a narrative exclamation of Jesus’ proclamation from the cross, each can also stand alone as an icon of the redemptive enterprise of God in Christ, and it is thus that I have dealt with them today. Let me review them.
The free forgiveness of sin from the cross is an icon of God’s Love, and as I have suggested, a love which cannot be touched, tempered or mitigated by human offense or violence. Christ is not changed by our sin, rather, we are transformed by Christ’s grace.
The word of comfort spoken to the Good Thief and unspoken to the Bad Thief is an icon of God’s Mercy, a mercy which is God’s free gift to every person through Jesus.
The word to Jesus’ mother is an icon of God’s Justice, and I have seen the overturning of the world’s false justice revealed together by cross and Magnificat.
The word of anguish — My God, My God — from the abyss is an icon of Trust in God. That no one is forgotten, no one unremembered by God. That God may be counted upon, and our cries are not in vain.
The complaint of thirst is an icon of every human Desire for Reunion with God.
The declaration “It is finished” is an icon of Faith. That life in all its mystery has meaning and purpose which we will be shown.
And finally, this Seventh Word in an icon of pure Joy.
In a mystery beyond our understanding, God has in Christ’s death on the cross, and in his Easter rising — the celebration of which we even now anticipate and prepare — resolved the problem of good and evil and God has reconciled humanity to himself. In Christ’s last words we see the elements of this wonder:
Love, Mercy and Justice as God’s free and gracious gifts to a broken world.
Trust, Desire and Faith as Jesus’ own self-offering to the Father.
And Joy, by which and in which all good things have their beginning and end.
