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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.
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Good Friday
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 23:34, 43, 46; John 19:25-27, 28, 30; Matthew 27:46
A Sermon by
on
Luke 23:34, 43, 46; John 19:25-27, 28, 30; Matthew 27:46
✛
Jesus' Seven Last Words from the Cross
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The First Word: “Father forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Two also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with Jesus. When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Luke 23: 33-34
Few accounts in history or in literature have made such an impression on the world as the dying of Jesus. The effect of it is increased by the brevity with which the Gospels record it.
Taken together the events of Jesus’ passion are an inventory of horror following horror. Yet at the most crucial, the most dramatic moment of the story, the Gospel writers pass on quickly and spare the reader those details which would have fascinated today’s news and television crews and led to visual repeat after repeat. The crucifixion would, no doubt, have become a significant YouTube success.
Cruelty in Jesus’ times was commonplace. Punishment, rather than reformation of the offender, was the ready extreme alternative for someone who did not willingly conform. Josephus records in his first century chronicle the situation of a youth who persistently disregarded his parents, making a thorough nuisance of himself that he “be led forth by their own hands without the city, followed by the multitude, and stoned to death.”[i]
For Jesus, and the many others sentenced to crucifixion, it was a grim custom whereby a scorned and scourged man was forced to carry his own cross outside the city, and uphill, to his death.
We are told nothing of how Jesus was laid on the wood. Nor of the impailing by nails. Nor yet of the shock to his racked torso as the burden on his back was jolted into place on the vertical timber ready and waiting after its previous killing.
Crucifixions would have broadly been the same as each other and it is clear that nearby soldiers were given liberty to carry out whatever macabre and sadistic pleasures their fantasies could conjure. We tend to think of Jesus as elevated high. But why should we think this? The feet of the dying man might only have been slightly above ground level. The eventual outcome would be the same.
If this were so and if he were little more than eye level from his tormentors the leering humiliation of this degrading death would have been the greater. Dogs might have fouled his feet. His pinioned arms could not waft away the increasing buzz of besieging and tormenting flies around his torn open flesh.[ii]
And yet we must not think that Jesus’ death was any more vicious than many others whether in recorded or in untold history. Narratives from holocaust death camps tell of many. And sad it is that even in our own supposedly more enlightened times we are no strangers to the utmost awfulness of what one person can do to another, to say nothing of the way we destroy nature.
In this context Jesus offered words that gospel writers thought it right to record. They chose to do so at the same time as deciding not to include material that might appeal to the more perverse of human nature. In other words they left out much violent material and the accompanying detail that would have embellished it.
The first of the seven words of Jesus which the gospel writers preserved were his words of forgiveness. It is these words that showed his love for sinners which the gospel writers remembered and which through the pages of scripture are now in our hands.
I concede these words aren’t there in all the ancient manuscripts and they sit somewhat uneasily in the text for it isn’t clear to whom Jesus’ forgiveness exactly refers. But this, it seems to me, is their reason for being there. Later editors and redactors who might have sought to smooth out the text could have had them deleted. But they did not. So crucial are these words of Jesus that they remained.
These are words that are appropriate in the One who had, throughout his walkabout ministry, offered the forgiveness of God to men and women in need of hearing this word of God’s forgiveness.
In his lifetime such words constituted a capital offence. Now that the capital punishment was being exacted, on the cross, it was justly fitting and I suggest inevitable, that he would repeat those words of divine forgiveness.
Jesus recognised that those who were doing to him what they were doing had no freedom to realise how wrong their actions were. Moral freewill had no place in the minds of those who secured Jesus and the two criminals to their fate that day. Any desire, they might have had, to do otherwise had been overridden by the requirement to ‘obey orders’. For those of you in the military this will be familiar.
But even for the rest of us, and if Jesus’ words were meant more generally for humanity as a whole, something very similar is nearby. Paul writes, “It is not I that do evil, but sin which dwells within me.” (Romans 7:17,20)
Yes, sin as something inside us that, virus like, chews away at the most fundamental features of human virtue when considered at their best: good and well-meaning desire, passion, wilfulness, kindness, courtesy, truth telling – and so on.
But there is also another dimension. Sin is also something we deliberately do. For example I might choose to go to this bar rather than that bar in order to sample the ‘delights’, so to speak, that might be found within. I might choose this tax dodge or that questionable expenses bluff and claim the thirty pieces of silver that then accrue.
So then, whether the sinning comes by, first, having to obey orders, or second, from fulfilling our duty to the institution, or three, from within as the inevitable consequence of human being, or four, from my deliberate and perverse choice each of us needs to say of oneself, “I am the one who needs to hear the word of forgiveness that comes from the cross upon which hangs and depends my salvation.”
What I am saying behind all this is that the word of forgiveness which came from the lips of Jesus that day was not only for the soldiers who manhandled him. It was not only for Pilate who had earlier washed his hands of him. It was not only for the Jewish leadership who wanted rid of him. As we hear Jesus saying down through the centuries, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” we hear a word of forgiveness that today is directed at me and at you. In each moment and on each occasion when sin comes from us, we cause yet more pain to the One who bears all pain.
In spite of all that was done to Him by others, and by what still he endures through what we do to Him in our wanton cruelty to others and to nature, still Jesus says to those with ears to hear him, ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’.
We have the certainty that Jesus continually offers the words of the Father’s forgiveness. What is all too often visibly lacking is our ready response to accept that forgiveness … and then … to live its reality …
The Second Word: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? 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 have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Luke 23:39-43
I follow in a long tradition of Anglican clergy who enjoy railway travel. Now I understand that not everyone can appreciate the sheer pleasure of a train journey in the way that I do. So if you’re one of the many who don’t like railways I just have to ask you to recognise and make due allowance for my rather sad approach to certain things of life!
Well, with that said, one of the benefits of a long train journey is the opportunity for some leisurely easy reading which, if indulged in at home, would postpone the vacuuming for several hours.
And so it was, on a long train journey, that I began a book (published in 1994) by British Author Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong.
It’s a big book, multi-layered in content, and although becoming something of a modern day classic back home, can be read quickly with an easy eye.
It’s also one of a number produced since about 1980 through which fictional but nonetheless real biography documents the appalling brutality which the 1914-1918 war visited upon each of its battlefield combatants.
Reading the book, and without realising what was happening to me, I became immune to the descriptions of physical injury and relentless suffering in the trenches.
What eventually, and thankfully, re-awakened my dulled senses back to compassion was the haunting narrative of a colossal list of names on a French war memorial to commemorate the dead of the Battle of the Somme.
A list of names inscribed on stone. A list which, as the years pass, risks becoming just a list, a litany of what people were called rather than a real memory of who they were.
To state the blindingly obvious, each of these names betokens a person who had a family of some sort, somewhere. Each had a unique story.
Some would have had brothers. Step-sisters perhaps. Some would have ill parents. Maybe a disabled neighbour for whom they had carried in coal to give warmth for the home. Each, for sure, would have preferred to have been anywhere rather than in the bullet ridden rain of Arras.
Meanwhile in other more recent, softer and spoilt areas of life, people crave to be known. Stretching queues form to get on celebrity, talent spotting television. Subscriptions soar for Hello magazine and other magazines like it so that we can read all about the goings on of the rich and infamous. And elsewhere the singer croons, “I did it my way.” Better, I suggest, to have sought to do it God’s way.
But I mustn’t criticise others too freely for, and I confess it myself, we all have a desire to be known and to be loved, to be understood and to be liked.
There is in each of us I suggest, a fear of being forgotten and unloved, of becoming just a reference number in a call centre, a zip code. Or, and sadly, just a name on a list amongst columns of others whether in an electronic database or on a Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in a big smalltown in Iowa, or on list of peacekeepers on the wall of the UN building here in your own city.
Some time ago a conversation took place between three condemned prisoners who were passing their final hours together in a macabre rite of passage from this life.
There was no automatic bond between them in their dying. One of them, for example, taunted one of the others who hung near to him. Hardly the time or the place I would have thought to choose to pick on someone. But nevertheless that’s what he did.
And yet, as we read of this in Luke’s account of the passion, this taunting criminal was not the first person to have done something like that to this now dying man from Nazareth.
His bitter words were, “Are you the messiah? Then save yourself and us.” Sarcastic words. Words of irony. Words adding yet more layers of humiliation within the course of an irreversible execution.
But they were not wasted words for they served as a foil for the third, hitherto unquoted criminal to venture his own comment.
He rebukes the first for his words of cruelty. In doing so he voices sentiments from the Old Testament: firstly the cupbearer’s request to Joseph in Genesis 40:14 and then secondly the Psalmist’s praise before God in Psalm 106:4. In each of these places the speaker wants to be remembered and not be forgotten.
So, in the scene on Golgotha this third, somewhat more sympathetic criminal seems to suggest that because Jesus’ eternal destiny may be different from his own fate he needs Jesus’ promise that he will not be forgotten.
His plea is to be remembered. In his situation he can do nothing to merit Jesus’ favour. His nails impale him beyond all but the slightest movement. He can only voice words which betoken repentance for crimes and sins committed as well as benevolent deeds omitted. All that is left is to implore the grace of Jesus to remember him when he comes to his sovereign place in God’s eternity.
In the brutality of the crucifixion dying there is loss of dignity, loss of meaning, loss of significance, loss of humanity. And for two of those who died there with Jesus that day there was loss of identity. We don’t have their names. And we know very little about them.
But what we do know is crucial. For on the hilltop dying of Golgotha one of the three said to his mocked and condemned colleague, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He did not want to be lost and forever forgotten.
Nor would those on European battlefield memorials. Nor those of your own dead. Nor the internationals who have died keeping peace. Nor those who languish unvisited in our mental hospitals and nursing homes.
Beyond his own grave and the grave of Jesus the penitent, condemned criminal wanted to be remembered.
He needed his dying and his death to have some eternal significance. And he voiced, whether consciously or unconsciously, that significance as drawing from the eternal kingship of Christ, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Accordingly Jesus, amongst his other final words, gave him – the criminal – his personal assurance of a place in paradise. To those in need of hearing his word of justice Jesus gives his assurance of a place at his right hand, “Truly I tell you: today you will be with me in Paradise.”
In our day to day reduction of people to reference numbers, zip codes, index notes, lengthening lists on memorials we risk forgetting who these people were as actual persons in human life. Nonetheless we have the blessed assurance that not only they, but you and me and, yes, the Golgotha criminal all have our names remembered and eternally inscribed on the sacred heart of Jesus who, as Christ, is King and Lord reigning over the universe.
Inscribed on his heart, none of us lose who we really are. And for that we give thanks.
[This address is based on an earlier, very similar published version. See Robert A. Gillies The Expository Times Vol 123:1, October 2011, pages 33-35]
The Third Word: “Woman, behold thy son! … Behold thy Mother!”
… standing near 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 beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold thy son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold thy mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. John 19:25b-27
A friend of mine[iii] tells the story of one of those nightmare bus journeys through the mountains of the Mediterranean island of Crete. Along perilously narrow roads that teetered on the edge of cavernous drops, my friend’s bus knife-edged a fine balance. Simultaneously depending on gravity to hold it safely and securely on the road whilst at the same time defying gravity’s destructive pull into the depths of cliff lined gorges below.
Coupled with the speed of the bus was clear and alarming evidence that the driver only occasionally seemed to need his hands to keep his vehicle’s balance just sufficiently to the safe side of the gaping void that yawningly threatened to consume both bus and passengers alike.
But there is more to the story for, hanging from the driver’s sun visor, was a complete oratory of icons and statues of (mostly) the Blessed Virgin Mary. In other settings these might have seemed worthy. However in that particular location they confused what vision the driver might otherwise have had. Along with the minimal use of his hands to guide the bus we can also add his minimal need for vision.
My friend who tells this story, and which I confess I am elaborating a little, is a theologian. I asked the question, “Did God, aided by the prayers of the mother of Jesus, guarantee everyone’s safety that day?”
“Most certainly”, came the answer, “because the bus driver didn’t.”
I recount this story for you not least to remind us of the near universal devotion to Our Lady. She has a very particular place in the Gospels (though, I concede, enigmatically so in Mark). She was called to be the mother of Jesus and thus the mother of our salvation. She was there within sight of him at the cross. From the cross he spoke one of his seven final words to her and, as a consequence of all this, her place in the salvation he won is very firmly secured.
She too has won and found a place within the devotion of others who, like the beloved disciple at her side before the cross and to whom Jesus similarly spoke, look to her as a son would to the mother he loves.
The Virgin Mother of Our Lord was there in the birth stable and at the death gallows. At Bethlehem on that first Christmas night her womb emptied and gave to us the hope of a new day. As Jesus saw through his final hours on Calvary, just outside Jerusalem’s city walls, that new day was to begin with a tomb set aside to contain him. It was a tomb which was soon to empty.
What is sometimes not realised is that Mary could have saved Jesus. If he had had a human father and had been conceived by natural means Mary could have named that father and spared her son his early cruel death. True, all Jesus’ claims to sovereignty with the Father would have been undermined. But would not a mother do such for the son she loves if she knew the truth of his parentage to be so?
She could not for she knew, and had known before anyone else, where Jesus had come from. The truth had set her free from feigning a falsehood that could have had him freed. Jesus had to go the way set for him. The salvation of humanity destined this to be so. And his mother had to allow this to happen for that was the truth.
As she gazed on his dying he returned her look. By her was the beloved disciple. Jesus commended the one to the other for their mutual care and well-being. And the disciple took her to his home.
What we are not told about is the grieving, and it would have been anguished wailing, in the home that night. There would have been little appetite for food let alone any desire to set about preparing it. Would friends and neighbours have come around? Might they have kept their distance – listening, distracted from any other chore, by the wailing of a woman who has seen her child killed by the state in what Cicero has described as the most ghastly form of torture ever invented.
The cruelty of it all pierced her heart. Recorded for us is the image of the woman standing with the beloved disciple as Jesus gasps towards his last. Little wonder artists in paint and music have expressed their gifts and skills in reflection upon the stabat mater, the desolate and powerless mother standing by the cross.
It is her image as the mother of salvation that has led to her appropriate veneration the world over. Her cries of labour pain in the stable gave way to the joy of nursing. Perplexity would have come her way when during his Galilean ministry her son noted another family and said to her and to others, “Look, these are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of my Father is my brother, my mother, my sister.” Whatever would Mary have made of this? What heartache it would have caused her. And then we have her cries of weeping, we can assume, at his words to her and the beloved disciple in his hours of dying.
Let me share with you a personal story. About fifteen years ago I was in Jerusalem. My mother was with me. She had had a difficult life, much sadness, much perplexity. Recently having had a second hip replacement, I took her to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre towards the end of the day when the crowds were thinning and she could move with less vulnerability from people jostling and bumping into her.
In the church we stood (she preferred standing) gazing for a long time towards the place where it is given the cross of Jesus had itself stood. After a while I read a guide book and realised that, without having known it, we were standing at the spot where tradition has it Mary and the beloved disciple stood when Jesus spoke to them.
I glanced sideways at my mother. In an instant I saw her life of complete faith in God and her commitment to Him. I recognised all the ambiguities and complexities of family life with the difficult demands, in every respect, of living in a small everyone-knows-everything-about-you neighbourhood. I saw her physical discomfort, if not well disguised, physical pain. And I glimpsed in that sideways glance, an image – an icon if you will – of the stricken Mother of our Lord standing on that same spot.
It was a truly precious moment … and a bitterly painful one.
When the time came to leave I took her back to our lodging.
Amen.
The Fourth Word: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew 27:45-46
My earliest years in ordained ministry were spent in a town in an area known as Scotland’s ‘central belt’. Approximately thirty miles to the east one is in the heart of Edinburgh. To the west in about the same distance is Glasgow. Stirling, just a little less than the thirty miles, is northward. It’s a busy area of mixed economy with a wide range of housing and apartments. Some declining industries are being wound down whilst the area reinvents itself, yet again, with new prosperity possibilities. There are rich and poor in the town. There are many incomers, many long-term settlers and some life-long residents.
Whilst some vantage points in the town command widespread vistas of glorious beauty others are more demanding upon the eye and upon social concern alike.
So it was in my pastoral rounds as a junior curate that I regularly visited a house where Bert, the husband was seriously incapacitated both in speech and in mobility because of a quite awful stroke. On a monthly basis I celebrated Holy Communion for him and his wife in their home. These were simple and very dignified occasions.
In due course Bert’s wife, his main carer, was tragically diagnosed as having a terminal and very rapid cancer. She had to be hospitalised. Bert too had to go into hospital for he couldn’t look after himself at home.
Whilst I was sitting with his wife in her last hours at the hospital, Bert was brought up from his ward. Her speech was barely audible. He could barely manage more than a word, so dreadful had been his stroke. Conversation between them was impossible. Minimal too was the necessary comfort that comes with physical touch. Tears of frustration and despair poured down his cheeks as I placed their hands into one another’s.
After Bert had been taken back to his ward, his wife whispered her disbelief in a God who could allow all this. I replied that God, in Jesus, had entered human suffering and knew what it was like from inside.
Whether this convinced or not I will never know but there was a look of new realisation on her face as I spoke.[iv] She died later that day.
Jesus’ fourth word from the cross, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’
These are words which were not just spoken once. They are words which resonate from the chasms of anguish every time the reality of God’s absence is known in the hour of one’s deepest despair.
I say this because we cannot, and must not, gloss over the real desolation and sense of abandonment by God to which Jesus gave voice that day and which still cry out from those who know what abandonment by God means.
In Jesus’ case the words are the cry of the Word of God made flesh, the Son of God, who was where he was as the consequence of actions by both his own Hebrew nation as well as by Gentile peoples and by the threat he posed to each of them.
Jesus didn’t just ‘feel’ abandoned. Such an interpretation tries to sugar these hard words towards comforting acceptability. We cannot do that. It would be wrong. These words, in all their gaping rawness have to be taken as they are because that is how two of the gospel writers have bequeathed them to us. What Jesus said cannot be plied with artificial sweeteners to calm our troubled breast at the sound of his searing, scorching words.
This cry of Jesus reveals the anguish of one utterly rejected by just about every friend and foe alike and with little or no mercy to hand. It came during the sixth to the ninth hour of his execution day; the noon to 3pm of this observance. Three hours of waiting to hear, to anticipate, to hope for God’s release from the mounting agony. Only to realise, as the sun clocked the passage of the day, that this was not to be.
The pathos of Jesus’ humanity was at its fullest in this hour and found its most darkest outcome in this fourth word as Jesus goes, to quote Karl Barth, ‘into the far country.’[v]
This ‘far country’ is a void. It is Jesus ‘descending into hell’. What is happening here is the consequence of human failing and human frailty. It is the place where creation has been mishandled. It is the place where all that we have got wrong in our societies and in ourselves reaches its zenith.
It is the ‘far country’ where God is absent but, and this is crucial, it is the land where Jesus went.
From nowhere else could he have voiced those familiar words of the psalmist with such personal intensity. More so than even in his isolation and desert temptations he now finds himself in the place of abandonment for no reason other than to offer rescue and redemption for all others whose reality takes them there.
This was no pretence. No stage drama. The words of the cry of dereliction were not phoney. They were real. In order to go to the far country of abandonment Jesus had to go into actual abandonment.
Jesus inhabits the place of abandonment so that God might, through him, redeem even it.
For that reason nowhere is beyond God’s possibility of redemption. Jesus had to go to that ‘far country’ and in doing so flooded it with the love of his presence in even the moment of his deepest despair and abandonment.
I now return to where I began. I do not know whether the look of realisation which I glimpsed on the face of Bert’s dying wife in her hospital ward back in the mid 1970’s was a look that signalled she had found something new from what I said in her moment of despairing desolation.
Nor do I know whether her’s was a distant look that came from the ‘far country’, so to speak, where she had found herself alongside Jesus in that moment of abandonment by God.
Equally I have to accept the enigma that it might have been none of these.
But what I do know is that Jesus took his dying and redeeming life into that ‘far country’ and that for each of us his arms are outstretched and are waiting to carry us from it and on to a better place.
Amen.
The Fifth Word: “I thirst”
After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), “I thirst.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. John 19:28
“I thirst.” This is a difficult and emotionally demanding two word statement upon which to reflect. What Jesus said, so bare yet so full of intensity, identifies, with many of his other statements, the sheer humanity of who he was.
These two words from the cross portray his feelings in the clearest possible terms. “I thirst.” Meaning by this, “I am thirsty”, “My lips and my mouth are dry”, “Can’t you see what’s happening to me”, “Please give me a drink …” and so on.
How poignantly these words from the cross contrast with other words from earlier in John’s Gospel. At the wedding feast in Cana in Galilee Jesus had given new wine for everyone to drink from the water that was freely available when the first wine reserves were running low. How he must have yearned on the cross for just a little of that water, so plentiful and so readily available to him then, but now so absent in his dying, drying hour on the cross.
And then think upon his conversation with the woman who had come to draw water at the well in Samaria and had found this Galilean stranger already there. In the course of their conversation he had promised her eternal water – yes, we know he was using metaphor but his meaning was clear. Nourishment and refreshment sufficient for now and for eternity was what he was offering her. And he said this to her with water by the bucket load in the well next to where the two of them were speaking. His reference was to something more than could be lifted from the recesses of an underground spring.
But now, at this very moment here on the cross Jesus lacked even a drop of that simple refreshment in the most ordinary way imaginable.
One can conjecture the irony of his earlier words when, just before his arrest, John records Jesus’ rhetorical question that “he must drink the cup that his Father has given him.” Right now, on this cross, and in this hour, he was indeed drinking the cup his Father had given him but he had to do so with parched lips, tongue, gum and throat.
It could be that what I am saying will resonate with your own experience? Possibly sitting by the bedside of a dying relative or friend. Perhaps having been really ill yourself as others moved around you as you lay on your bed.
Let me ask you a question. What is it that counts most in those situations? What is the greatest need?
Medical care certainly. Yes, pain relief too. Particular items that will give increased comfort – maybe the water matress to help stop painful sores forming; items to help you sit up or things which tilt to help you stand, a frame to support your steps as you walk to the restroom or bathroom; shades, drapes or curtains at the window that can dim the room if there’s too much light or which can be opened to permit a view beyond the immediate walls of confinement.
What counts as vitally important are the big little things. When my mother lay in her final coma a lovely memory I have is when the nurse gently tidied her hair with a silky soft brush. Moving one lock of hair off my mother’s forehead she quietly said to her, ‘just in case it’s tickling you’. A big, little thing.
And then there’s those wonderful sponge pads we have in the UK, you probably the same or something like them here in the United States, which when dipped in a special pink coloured solution ease dessicated, parched lips and the chalking mouth. It’s best when the person doesn’t even need to ask for them. When someone sees the need and just does it and uses them for the person who needs the moisture, especially if it is in their dying time. Kind and careful touching acts help the pathway from this life to the next and give the simplest ease to the one who most needs it.
On the cross Jesus voiced those words, “I thirst.” No exquisite theology is needed to understand what he is saying and what he needed. The psalm we have just said points out what was to come. Here in this hour on this cross it is being fulfilled.
Those who heard him and wanted to respond got a branch. If what I said in my first address was the case and Jesus was not elevated high from the ground then it could have been a branch of soft hyssop that was used to get fluid to him. It would have reached and done the job adequately. That’s what the original suggests.
But what was it that was offered him? Sour vinegar! Sour vinegar! What is that to offer to someone who is dying? What refreshment is sour vinegar to the person whose most recent words were “I thirst.”
Sour wine is not given for refreshment. (If it was given for intoxication so as to dull the mind to what was happening then John does not record it as such.) In reality sour wine would be bitter to the taste and would dehydrate yet further. It would dry the immediate skin and if drunk down would dehydrate systemically.
Once more we find the psalmist’s words coming true, “… for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.”[vi]
Jesus, in the hour of his most tender and human need, is given sour wine, vinegar, to drink.
The action is one of mockery. Given the macabre sadisms to which prisoners for crucifixion were subjected both before and during their ordeal we perhaps should have expected nothing else.
I referred a few minutes ago to the miracle of the water being turned into wine at Cana in Galilee. There was plenty of water available to him then, at was that start of Jesus’ public ministry. For all intents and purposes it was the beginning, for him, of his way to the cross.
But now, here on the cross, he receives sour wine as that ministry draws to its close. There is to be no water for him.
We do well however, to read a few verses further on in John’s gospel. A soldier pierces Jesus’ side with a spear. We are told that blood and water flowed forth.[vii]
A whole new address could be formed around this. But as I bring this particular reflection to a close let me leave you with the image. Think, in your mind’s eye, of the Word made flesh, Jesus, thirsty to the depths of his very being, giving to us from the very depths of his generosity as the Book of Revelation puts it, a “river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.”[viii]
Denied water at his own moment of greatest need, Jesus offers the water of eternal life for all who seek refreshment.
The Sixth Word: “It is finished”
When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. John 19:30
The sixth word: ‘It is finished’; sometimes translated with equal accuracy as ‘it is accomplished’ or ‘it is completed’. In other words everything has been brought to its proper conclusion. The work begun had come to its end, the Sabbath was shortly to begin, and a time of rest could descend.
The verb used here is the same one as might be used in the settlement of debt or the payment of a bill. More colloquially, and evocatively, it could mean the price due has been paid ‘on the nail’ as we might say in the UK.
Equally the use of the perfect tense is significant. It signals that an action has done its job but its effect continues.
What is being described here of Jesus’ dying is different from that of the Jewish martyr tradition of the day. Other sources tell of majestic deaths within this tradition.[ix] Jesus isn’t part of that, not least because the gospels record the sheer brutality of what happened with little heroic glory either for Jesus or for the few of his followers who had lingered.
Here in this hour of degradation Jesus abandoned his life in obedience to God and for the world. In dying, and in uttering these words ‘It is finished’, Jesus gave up his spirit and the world then received it as gift from him.
All that he had was now being given, and made available to all people everywhere willing to receive it, so that we can go about and not only do what he did, but, as the gospels tell us, do more besides.
Jesus giving up his human life cannot be separated from the giving of the gifts of his Holy Spirit so that these gifts might live in and be used as part of the life of his faithful followers from then on.
In our sensitive ears this may sound like real offence. Thus it might be said, ‘what sort of cruel and vindictive God is it who requires a death for others to live?’ The charge is a powerful one and has pugnacious force. So let’s try and understand it. Here’s a story.
One of our diocesan lay officers[x] was preaching in St Colman’s, Burravoe, in my diocese. This is a remote church, in a remote village, in one of the most northerly parts of the UK and is in fact the most northerly Anglican parish congregation in Great Britain.
To get to this furthermost part of my diocese requires a sixty minute flight (or an overnight ferry), then a fifty mile island car drive and another ferry to the peat riven island of Yell. That far north you’re nearer to the Arctic Circle than to London. It’s bleak and its windswept.
There are no corner flower shops. Gardens have to be robust to survive. Beauty is in the colour of the sky, the drama of the sea, the texture of the heather. Beauty is there in storm, rainbow and nightime aurora.
Anyway on the weekend when our youth officer was preaching the church had been having its annual flower festival. The church was appropriately decorated. Mostly with flowers that had sheltered by stone walls, rugged grasses and firm green leaf. There were some garden flowers, but, as you’ll have realised, in northern Shetland there isn’t all that much by way of cultivated, let alone, manicured garden. What there is, is special.
On that day next to the pulpit, itself a purposeful piece of wooden simplicity, was a display of peony roses placed by a ninety year old lady who was (is) a lifelong member of that congregation. In his sermon, Tony said something like this, “how would you react if I were to take one of these peony roses and destroy it?” There was, as you might imagine, something of a frisson in the congregation, not least because the ninety year old lady was sitting ten rows from the front on the back row.
But then, and after a careful pause he added, “But if I told you that this one peony rose needed to be destroyed in order that all other flowers and plants in the church could be saved from some dreadful fate that was to come to them, what would your reaction be?” The penny dropped.
In this circumstance taking the one rose would be a privilege because of what it would then release for all others to have life even though it would be no more. It was a powerful image to use in a sermon, clear and brilliantly evocative. What’s more the lady felt inwardly very honoured that her item of beauty had been selected for such an illustration.
To say the same thing another way, words that spoke of conflict were rendered inoffensive by the application of an outcome which justified otherwise offensive sacrifice. The rendering of this analogy to Jesus was well understood by the hearers of that sermon.
Nonetheless and to our politically correct ears, as well as to our notions of ‘rights’ (including the right to live), there is offence in the thought that God required (or permitted) the death of Jesus in order for the gifts of the spirit to be released to the world and for the world to know salvation.
Equally there is offence that Abraham had been required to offer Isaac as a sacrifice – though we must remember the point of that story was to test the faith of Abraham. As things turned out the sacrifice was never needed. Likewise there is offence that Lot offered his daughters to a marauding gang so that other innocent life might be spared – though again we must remember that, though offered, Lot and his daughters were spared by God.
And many of us would, admittedly in the extreme of circumstances, make or offer supreme sacrifices so that others might live. It’s a human thing to do. And it’s what Jesus did.
The Letter to the Hebrews makes great play of the sacrifice of Jesus. Though, that said, we must remember in Jewish custom no human sacrifice was needed. What is more, if Jesus was to accomplish all he needed to, and that the means for this was through his death, then the Roman soldier-executioners on the day had no authority to offer any such sacrifice. Nor did the Temple authorities who condemned him. And less so Pilate who washed his hands of the whole tawdry affair.
No, Jesus did what had to be done himself and went the way required of him alone. It was his total self-giving and self-emptying and he required nothing of anyone else beyond what they had been told to do to carry out his execution.
Jesus submitted himself in due time and in full human agony, so that with all that he needed to do now finished, in the Sabbath stillness of the next day there could be preparation for what was to follow. What had gone before in his life and dying is inseparable from what was still to happen in his rising and in the giving of his spirit.
So, before bowing his head and giving up his spirit to the Father, Jesus uttered these words for the life of the world, ‘It is finished’.
With equal truth he could have added … ‘It is only just beginning’ …
For so it was, Amen.
The Seventh Word: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, 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 your hands I commend my spirit.” 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!” Luke 23:44-46
Our time together today is drawing towards its close. I have shared personal insights with you. I have offered reflections upon Jesus’ death. I have put before you challenges and reassurances, re-awakenings and reminders. Perhaps for some of you the moment of conversion has come.
On that first Good Friday were the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee. They now stood before the cross. We know their names from earlier on in the gospel.[xi] His other “acquaintances” (namely the men) were also there. And so too were the crowd and the Roman centurion.
The centurion was the soldier doing his duty, waiting through those three hours. He witnessed the human-bound ending of what Jesus was sent to do, namely the preaching of the kingdom of God.[xii]
In his dying Jesus forgives a sinner on a nearby cross and assures him of a place in paradise. Without a word to the centurion, near the foot of the cross, the centurion comes to faith. We can’t say it was a Christian faith in the way we understand it nowadays – his conversion came too early for assimilation into patterns familiar to us.
Whilst all these events unfold the skies darken.
All of this is the backdrop to what happens in the foreground as Jesus hands over his all to God with the words, “Father into thy hands I commit my spirit.”
My father in law, now 94, is a priest. He has passed on to me what he was taught him many years ago when in training. In response to the question, ‘What shall I preach about?’ the answer came ‘When you preach, preach Christ, and him crucified’.
This is the converting ordinance of the cross. When the sinner, you and me, is before the cross and gazes at what is there we are confronted with nothing other than the utter love of God being freely given for us.
We do not deserve the love of God. None of us do. Yet in spite of this the Gospels consistently present Jesus’ death as an action of God’s free love being freely given. Mark portrays the death of Jesus as a “ransom for many”[xiii]. Paul speaks of Jesus “put to death for our sins”[xiv]. Luke’s picture of the dying of Jesus is of the one who forgives and who brings the sinner to new life by his own suffering. All of this for us who least deserve it.
I ask you as I come towards my close to visualise the cross of Jesus. I have suggested to you that the cross may not have been elevated very high. Whatever the situation, Jesus is there before you. He is there for you. Individually. Personally. He is there for the penitent thief impaled alongside. He is there for the centurion on guard below. He is there for you.
There is nothing that can separate you from the love of God shown in Christ Jesus: Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation…[xv] Not even our own sinfulness or the sinfulness of others can separate us from the love of God.
On the cross his love for you is there. Whatever we get wrong in the church. Whatever goes wrong in your life, in my life, unmistakeably there before us on the cross is the love of God for you, for me, for the person next to you.
As the sky darkened over Jerusalem at that ninth hour of the day, today’s 3pm, Jesus commended his soul into the hands of his father. The glowering gloom of a dark today heralds the glory of a new dawn tomorrow.
If for you right now, in your own life and in your own circumstances, the skies are dark over you, I ask you to gaze on Christ crucified. With the penitent thief and the centurion see for yourself what the Son of God has already done for you. And see today’s darkness as the beginning of tomorrow’s new light.
May that new light be truly yours. Amen.
[i] Josephus Antiquities 4:264
[ii] Some of this material has been drawn from my volume Sounds before the Cross, Handsel Press, 2007, pp61-62
[iii] With acknowledgment to the Very Revd Graham Forbes. Images used in this address were freely adapted from his article ‘Mary, Blessed Are You Amongst Women’ in The Expository Times, 121:6 p324.
[iv] I recount this story in my A Way for Healing, Handsel Press, 1995
[v] I am indebted to Prof Christopher Seitz for reminding me of this Barthian image. See Seitz Seven Lasting Words Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, pp29-34. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 59.
[vi] Psalm 69:21b; cf also Psalm 22:15
[vii] John 19:34
[viii] Revelation 22:1
[ix] See 4 Maccabees 6
[x] Tony Whitbread, Diocesan Youth Officer for the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney, Scotland. I’m grateful to him for this narrative and reproduce it here with permission.
[xi] Luke 8:2-3
[xii] cf Luke 4:43
[xiii] Mark 10:45
[xiv] Romans 4:25 and 1 Corinthians 15:3
[xv] Romans 8:38-39
