Good Friday
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
John’s Passion should surprise us. It is not like the other Gospels. If we look closely, Jesus is never out of control. In the other Gospels Jesus seems sometimes like a rag doll thrown about on the cruel winds of human vindictiveness. We feel sorry for him. Here, at every stage Jesus has the power to stop events. When Jesus speaks to the arresting party, they immediately fall to the ground, such is his power. Jesus stops the disciples from protecting him. And his response is telling: ‘Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?’ It’s the exact opposite of the so-called agony in the garden. Jesus here cannot imagine a life where the cup is not his to drink, still less, pray for it to be taken from him. Under interrogation Jesus is calm, reasonable. He is positively sassy towards Pilate: When asked if he’s the king of the Jews he responds: ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ Pilate becomes frightened by the crowd, but Jesus gives him no answer. The Jews complain because Jesus is announced as the thing they fear: the king of the Jews; Pilate executes a man he believes is innocent; Who has power in this situation?
It’s Jesus. On the cross, he arranges for his mother to be looked after by his friend. Even at the point of death he’s speaking to fulfil scripture; His control of events is such that he narrates his own death: ‘it is finished.’
In sin, uncertainty, anxiety, fear, confusion, desperation, all those who seem to have power lose it. The high priests, Pilate, the crowd; They have no freedom – They’re acting against their own will and desire. There’s a desperate storm of humanity rushing around and against the stillness of Christ.
The Gospel is always asking: are you following the standards of the world or of God? When you look for freedom is it the freedom to do whatever you want, to satisfy every passing desire, to change like the wind? Or is the freedom to be yourself? Unswayed by the world, or passing influence, but to be true to your character, your beliefs, your God?
When you look for power, is it the power to affect the world as you’d like; to employ the functions of office as high as you can achieve them? Or is it the power to be in charge of your life, independent of influence? To do the thing you know is right? To make an unpopular decision, to take a stand? The power to be your own person.
In John’s Passion Christ alone has freedom, Christ alone has power. Only he acts according to his own nature. It is the truth of the Gospel. The ability to be honestly and with integrity, yourself.
In the other Gospels, we hear the events unfold with compassion. We might feel our own fear at the kafka-esque bewilderment of how things can go so wrong so quickly without reason. We’re reminded of the injustice of totalitarian states, sham trials, torture, capital punishment. We pity Christ. Here, in John, we are left in a state of awe. The crucifixion is a willful act of love. A determined effort to show what humanity is; And what God is. Jesus endures the cross for the love of the world. It’s less the fearful cross of injustice. More the cross of glory for which hour Jesus has come. This is the faithful, wondrous cross, the noble tree; The cross that is venerated, worshipped. A cross transformed from punishment and sin to the power of love; A cross that has become an altar.
I have spoken before of how John is a master of irony. How he surprises us through the Gospel with reversals of expectations. How the villainous high priest Caiaphas receives the true prophecy that one man must die for the people, even though he doesn’t understand it. How in the divine raising of Lazarus we find Jesus weeping; And yet at the godless cross we see divine resilience. How the supposed power of Pilate becomes impotence before the crowd. John uses irony to nudge us to faith. To help us understand why St Paul would say, ‘may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.’ Boasting in this cross. And again, that ‘the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.’ We see how the cross is taken by the early church and transformed from a grotesque and feared sign, Into a badge of honour, a sign of love; To become the symbol of Christianity, So not withstanding a rather different irony, the Christian Holy Roman emperor Constantine, can say of the cross, a few centuries later: ‘in this sign conquer’. And so begins the reign of Christendom.
The cross for us may inspire compassion. It may command power. On this day we come it to rediscover the love of God for the world. To see how Christ transformed this sign of fear and violence, into a worldwide symbol of love. To repent our foolish notions of freedom and power; And find in Christ the way, the truth and the life. Amen.