At the Place of the Skull, God is Faithful

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Good Friday by the Rev. Holly Huff.

On this Holy Friday, Great Friday, this Friday we Christians so strangely call Good Friday, the cross is held before us as a challenge. It is both confrontation and consolation, demanding above all that we see differently, so we can be differently. Look and live! The cross is strong medicine: it is clearing our sight, restoring our vision, healing our heart’s perception, making us truly human and drawing us to God. It is the interpretive key to the topsy-turvy kingdom of God, the interpretive key of the Christian story as we tell it in church and as we are invited called, drawn to enter into and live it out ourselves, both in this place and the world beyond these walls. John’s Gospel over and over tells us that Jesus was lifted high on the cross to reveal God’s glory and draw the whole world to himself. What is this strange magnetism, the power contained and streaming out from this broken man nailed to a cross? 

Rejected by religious authorities, condemned by casually brutal mechanisms of empire, Jesus dies a slow and tortured death outside the city on a garbage heap that has become for us the center of the world. Golgotha, the place of the Skull, is said in tradition to be the site of Adam’s grave, and icons of the crucifixion often depict the skull of the first human being at the foot of the cross. The first thing that is revealed to us in Jesus’s death is our own death. We too are dead and dying, yes because we are mortal and moreso because we are not yet truly human, not yet responsive to love as it is continually being poured out for us but callous and unfeeling, with hearts of stone. The cross shows us the failure of our humanity. Good Friday insistently places this grim scene before us, saying, Look at this! Look at what has come of humanity, left to its own devices, when human beings arrogantly separate ourselves from our natural dependence on God. When we try to act as rulers of our own fate, this is where we end up: with murder in our hearts and on our lips and enacted in front of us, wilting away in complicity and compliance as we wash our hands of the evil we accept as inevitable, scorning the possibility of something as earnest as Truth with a capital T. 

And what we are being shown here, Adam’s Skull, is most certainly about the failure of our common humanity. God forbid we hear these passages as condemnations of the Jewish people specifically, as many Christians appallingly have over the centuries, weaponizing their supposed guilt of “killing Jesus” as an amoral justification to perpetrate yet more violence, slaughtering innocents in the name of God (which is surely the epitome of taking the Lord’s name in vain). No, as the Passion Gospel shows us, this story is about us, all of us. The liturgy puts those shocking words in all our mouths—“Crucify him!”—and this is a total confession in just two words, an admission of who we have been left to our own devices, relying on ourselves. “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.” The cross confronts us with the profound and abject failure of human self-conscious do-it-yourselfism. When love comes into the world, open and undefended, we kill it. As Annie Dillard puts it, “There has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day.” Or as the hymn we sang on Palm Sunday asks: “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? / Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee! / 'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; / I crucified thee.” (“Ah, holy Jesus, how has thou offended,” Hymnal 158)

And the challenge is not confined to the past: the cross calls us to see and acknowledge and repent of the ways we crucify our Lord still. Violence, hatred, executions, lynchings, wars and rumors of war, and the workaday cruelties of life according to the ego, I me mine at the center of things. We do not know how to live well. The law which points always to love is not written in our hearts. As individuals and as a people we crucify our neighbor, over and over. Have mercy on your crucified people, O Lord! We have no power in ourselves to help ourselves. Caught in a cycle of violence and hatred, breathing in fear more than air, around and around we spin, again and again. Suddenly—the cross like a spoke in the wheel. And our human machinations so seemingly inevitable come to a shuddering halt. The crucifixion comes with an earthquake, the veil in the temple is torn through, and time stops, and if we open our eyes to this strange sight, Jesus hung up in what looks like utter defeat, this cross will reveal to us the truth, yes with a capital T, Truth who is not a concept but a person: love embodied, God enfleshed in human life, pouring himself out even to death. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” 

Yes, the cross is a painful and bracing confrontation with human failure, our rejection of divine love given to us so selflessly. But having seen this, having made our confession, we are freed to see also in the cross the strong, enduring, and victorious faithfulness of God. Against all instrumental logic, the way of the cross is showing itself to be the way of life and peace. We have betrayed God and forsaken the one who loves us, but God has not forsaken us, and God in infinite generosity and mercy will use this very betrayal to work our redemption.

It goes against all our understanding of the order of things. Pilate stands before Jesus and exemplifies this confusion. He is there to question Jesus but you can see who is truly under judgement. Pilate wants to know whether Jesus is a king, or in other words whether Jesus poses any threat to the order of empire which the powerful called peace. “My peace I give to you,” Jesus told his disciples, “but my peace is not the kind of peace the world gives.” And he answers Pilate much the same: “My kingdom is not from this world. If it were, my followers would be fighting with the sword to protect me.” That would be business as usual in the violent eye-for-an-eye brutal exchange of the pax romana. But instead, Jesus is giving himself away, not just for his followers but for all people, even those who turned on him, even Pilate himself, standing spineless in the halls of power. Jesus’s peace and Jesus’s kingdom are not the workaday banality of evil structures of hidden and not-so-hidden violence we swim through even still. He goes to the cross out of love, for the joy that was set before him, the joy of undefended, surrendered love, receptive to the will of his Father, pouring himself out for us, holding nothing back. “This is my body, given for you.” This king willingly wears the crown of thorns, and promises his peace to us even as he reigns from the cross. 

We see at the cross the failures of human love, our betrayals, complicities, our wicked delight in the dramatic persecution of an identified enemy. Closed off to the love of God begging to move through us, we are each of us capable of selling lemonade at a lynching. The cross marks Adam’s grave, the place of the Skull, humanity dead on the water when we try to live by our own power. But the cross is also the power of God unto salvation, as Paul insists, and united inseparably to the empty tomb it is the strongest emblem of God’s faithfulness to us. Yes, when we see the cross we see the depth of human failure and our need for God. But we see also God’s faithfulness, God in Jesus giving himself into our grubby little hands, holding nothing back. He meets us where we are, comes to be with us in our alienation and self-enclosure and pain and refuses to leave us there alone. In his sufferings and death Jesus enters directly into what is most painful, alienating, and fragmenting. The message of the cross is that this surrender and weakness and suffering is the singularity, the origin point for God’s victory over death and fear and all that holds us bound. The world is being recreated. The tree of life is planted at the place of the skull, as God goes to the very outermost limits, the furthest points of distance and binding them to God’s self. “What has been assumed is being saved” as St. Gregory of Nazianzus summarizes the logic of Christian redemption. God’s humanity becomes our salvation, as God in Christ pours himself out prodigally to meet us. Jesus’s arms stretched wide on the cross images for us the openhanded yielded faithfulness. Even here, at the end of all things, I am with you, offering myself in love, love that is strong, a love that endures all things, even death. When I am weak, when I am meek and dependent on God, then I am strong. And so gracious is God in victory that it’s all given back to us, all of this is “for us and for our salvation.” Jesus is faithful even to the point of death, and God is faithful in raising him, as he tramples down death by undergoing death. And this makes it possible for us to be faithful too, as Jesus opens a new and living way through the curtain of his flesh, giving birth to a new humanity restored in his image, arms open wide, giving ourselves away. 

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen. (BCP 101)