A Homily for Good Friday, 2024

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Good Friday, March 29, 2024.

Good Friday is the day when the irreducible uniqueness of Christianity is thrust before us in all its scandalous particularity. Abandoned by his closest followers (Peter’s “I do not know the man” as he warms his hands over the fire), mocked, scourged, whipped, spit upon, pinned, and writhing on a tree between two criminals outside the city walls on a garbage heap, this is day when we see Jesus Christ–fully God and fully human–

without beauty or majesty, with no looks to attract our eyes… despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces… His appearance so marred, beyond human semblance.. his form beyond that of the children of men.

No wonder, in an age addicted to positive thinking and spiritual uplift–with “its paths to follow, techniques to master, knowledge to gain”–we flee, unwilling to stay at the foot of the cross with Mary and the beloved disciple. As courageous Episcopal preacher of the “word of the cross” Fleming Rutledge writes, “The world’s religions have certain traits in common, but until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world, no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man.” You can look high and low in the history of religions and never encounter anything like this: that the salvation of the world is wrought by a single death in an act of state-sponsored torture and execution to the barely contained glee of a mob who choose Barrabas over Jesus–”Crucify him! Crucify him!” Only Christianity would dream to include the name of an unremarkable, dithering civil servant–Pontius Pilate–as the only person other than Mary in its creedal confession. Only Christianity would dream with Martin Luther to utter those words–so shocking, so counter-intuitive, so opposed to our usual ways of human thinking–”The cross is the safest of all things. Blessed is the man [sic] who understands this.”

In the cross of Jesus Christ we see the once-and-for-all end of religious attempts by human beings from time immemorial to climb, win, gain, achieve, purify, and perfect ourselves into relationship with God. In the cross of Jesus Christ, we are cleaned and healed of the prideful delusion that the “unaided human being has… ‘natural’ or innate potential for spiritual knowlege… [and] can only receive it as an unmerited gift of God.” In the cross of Jesus Christ our inveterate tendency to supplant God’s power to save, heal, rectify, and redeem with our own efforts comes blessedly, mercifully, to an end as the Good News of having “no power in ourselves to help ourselves,” breaks in and upon us as the dayspring from on high. The cross of Jesus Christ is the safest place because its does its mercifully disillusioning work, shears from us all pretensions to justify ourselves, and rectify ourselves in relationship with God, and let God be God for us, to let God in the person and work of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit  justify and rectify us–not “what should we do?”--but what has God already done, finished, accomplished in the most inglorious and unexpected way possible in those arms outstretched on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come into the reach of Jesus’ saving embrace.

And by everyone, we mean every single one. As we hear in John’s Passion Gospel, “I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me." “God,” as Ezekiel reminds us, “does not desire the death of a single sinner.” A life that is truly life, a flourishing beyond what we can ask or imagine, a peace more sturdy and durable than anything we can cook up, mangage, control, or confect is God’s desire for God’s creatures. And it arrives, it comes to us, is disclosed to us as sheer gift unmerited and undeserved, from outside, beyond, and from above all human frameworks of self-improvement, moralism, sin management, and behavioral control. Not just Nicodemus as a teacher of Israel finds this difficult to understand. Humanity–since the very first grabbing of the apple in order to secure for itself knowledge of good and evil that belongs properly only to God and God alone–finds the word of the cross difficult to bear because it reminds us of our creaturely status before God, a creaturely status whose proper attitude is that of empty-handed receiving–not one thing to offer, but everything, simply everything, to ask.

The cross of Jesus Christ brings us to this place of need, for someone other than ourselves and our wit and guile to save us. It shows us our captivity, estrangement, and alienation from the Truth. It shows us our prideful self-reliance and our ingrained and inherited aversion to receiving something from outside ourselves. But the cross of Jesus Christ also reveals, apocalypses to us, what God has already done for us, what has been already accomplished on that darkened hill outside of Jerusalem between noon and three. Barth writes, “It is in Him that the judgement of God is fulfilled and the pardon of God pronounced on all…. It happened that in the humble obedience of the Son He took our place, He took to Himself our sin and death in order to make an end of them in His death.”

And God in the person and work of Jesus Christ does this not just for a select few, not just for the pious, the meritorious, the neat and tidy, the rewardable, or the deserving. The cross shows us that God’s saving work on the cross (the pinnacle and perfect culmination of Jesus’ entire life and ministry characterized by sacrificial self-offering) is for all–the impious, the ungodly, we hostile enemies of God in our self-enclosed far-offness. 

Barth continues with riff on Jesus’ “not a single one lost” before his arrest pounding the free gift of God’s grace poured out for us–“There is not one!”--with a forcefulness matched only by the hammer pounding nails into Jesus’ hands and feet

There is not one for whose sin and death He did not die, whose sin and death He did not remove and obliterate on the cross... There is not one to whom this was not addressed as his justification in His resurrection from the dead. There is not one whose man He is not, who is not justified in Him…. there is not one who is not adequately and perfectly and finally justified in Him. There is not one whose sin is not forgiven sin in Him, whose death is not a death which has been put to death in Him. 

Gone under the sign of the cross is the need to justify ourselves, to make ourselves right with God (as if we ever could). Gone, gone, gone under the sign of the cross is all that holds us captive in a sham freedom of our own making. Gone, gone, gone, in a great bonfire of love and mercy is all that alienates us, estranges us from the freedom of God’s universally chosen, promise-soaked, beloved children in Christ. Sin trampled down. Death trampled down. Powers, principalities, Satan trampled down–shadows, immaterial echoes, will-o-the-wisps spectrally playing on the face of a pond the Sun of Righteous is burning off mid-morning. All forsakenness is forsaken. All abandonment is abandoned. All casting out cast out. In Him.

Now, now, now in the stripes, in the vinegar, the wormwood, and the gall, in the cry of dereliction that renders all dereliction derelict, now, Barth continues, 

There is not one, therefore, who has first to win and appropriate this right for himself. There is not one who has first to go or still to go in his own virtue and strength this way from there to here, from yesterday to to-morrow, from darkness to light, who has first to accomplish or still to accomplish his own justification, repeating it when it has already taken place in Him.

No journey to make under my own steam from here to there, from darkness into light. No work to accomplish what has not been done for me between noon and three in 33 A.D. Now, now, now, 

There is not one of whom it is demanded that he should make and maintain this peace for himself, or who is permitted to act as though he himself were the author of it, having to make it himself and to maintain it in his own strength. There is not one for whom He has not done everything in His death and received everything in His resurrection from the dead.

“I did not lose a single one whom you gave me.” No peace we need to maintain as gifted receivers of His peace. Not one for whom everything has not been done, finished, accomplished, that true joy–His joy–might be freely ours. Good is too small a word for this day where a thirsting, forsaken, cursed man hanging on a tree between two condemned criminals wrought for us living water rising up to eternal life from vinegar, wormwood, and gall. Good is too small a word for the new wine mercy geysering from Jesus’ pierced side. Good is too small a word for death put to death in His death. Sprinkled clean our hearts. Washed pure now our bodies. Good is too small a word. Amen.