They will look on the one whom they have pierced.

     In the name of the Living God, Amen.

     Here we are again.  Here we are again at the foot of the cross, on which Jesus is dying.  We stand.  We look.  We are witnesses.  We wish we could be anywhere else, but we cannot imagine being anywhere else.  As we gaze, we try to bear it.  We try to make sense of it, this great story with its immense sweep.  But in all of John's long Passion narrative, this year my attention is drawn to this very last verse: "They will look on the one whom they have pierced."

     It's a quote, actually, from the book of Zechariah about what will happen on the day of the Lord in the coming of the messianic age.  In Zechariah, piercing is to bring forth a spirit of compassion.  It will call forth lament and mourning in those who see.  Something is broken open and exposed in the piercing.  It's unclear exactly who is being pierced in Zechariah's schema, but it may be a messianic figure.  It may be the prophet who is speaking in God's name.

     John uses this verse to talk about the piercing of Jesus' side from which blood and water flow out, prefiguring the Spirit, which will be given as Jesus is returning to God.  But even more, the crucifixion of Jesus is a kind of exposure - a breaking open - a lifting up.  I'm reminded of Jesus' own words earlier in John's gospel when he says, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness," (another strange figure from the Hebrew Bible) "so must the Son of Man be lifted up."  And later he says, "When I am lifted up from the earth"-  in a clear reference to the death that is coming-  "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself."

     Lifting up, bearing witness, exposure, breaking open.  What is it that we who stand at the foot of the cross see?  What is exposed, revealed, pierced through?

     The first thing that we see, that I see as I think about it, is that a political execution is going on.  We have heard the whole story of the last terrible twelve hours.  We know that it is the culmination of a longer story of Jesus' life and ministry.  The charges were trumped up.  This Jesus who is dying on the cross was teacher, healer, a prophet in love with the realm of God, but he is being killed as a threat to the power of Empire with the collaboration of the religious authorities.

     Christians have always said that there is a profound misunderstanding here; Jesus is executed as a messianic king who is seeking to overthrow the control of the Romans over captive Israel.  But perhaps more deeply, Jesus is being executed because the powers that be understand only too well what a radical threat he is to "the way we've always done it."

     His way has challenged power over- control that is exercised by fear and violence- the power of domination and victimization.  He has offered instead a power of loving service, a way of vulnerability and radical welcome for all.  His death comes out of what his life has been; he is dying because he has witnessed to love and justice.

     The crowd hoped and the authorities feared that Jesus was the messiah who would restore Israel as a separate kingdom under a Davidic king.  None of them had categories for the radically different kind of leader he was.  So as we stand here, we are seeing the death of someone who is perceived as a threat to the power of the world, and who is a threat to the power of the world, although not in the way that the world imagines.

     It is an ignominious and shameful death.  Isaiah is quoted often in the crucifixion narratives: he says, "He is numbered with the transgressors."  Jesus is crucified between two thieves; we might call them terrorists.  Crucifixion is a punishment reserved for criminal scum.  It horrifies pious people.  The gospel is understated, extremely understated and laconic about the violence of this way of dying.

     Scourging has been carried out as part of the death sentence, probably causing lacerations and loss of blood, and deeper damage below the surface.  It has weakened Jesus, who is made to carry his own crossbeam, for in John's account there is no Simon of Cyrene who helps him.

     Nails are pierced through his wrists and through his feet, and he hangs there in agony, but death comes becomes of slow asphyxiation, as the crucified one pulls his body up each time he tries to take a desperate breath.  We might imagine that there is hot sun and buzzing insects and circling vultures and blood and sweat and excrement.  There are the mocking bystanders and the soldiers who taunt him callously.

     We look at the brutal suffering, the pain, but also at the exclusion - at Jesus taking his place among the outsiders, the aliens, the others, the enemies, the sinners.  We see here the consequences of the human hunger for power, the consequence of the systems that run on fear and exclusion, on insistence on keeping "those people" out, on the refusal to forgive.  And we see in those systems what we, too, are capable of - what, from time to time, we do to one another and to ourselves.

     But also exposed in this moment are the consequences of Jesus' life.  "No one has greater love than this," he says, "than to lay down one's life for one's friends."  We see the consequences of commitment, of generosity, of willingness to go all the way with God.  And in a deeper mystery, as we have throughout Jesus' life and ministry, but never more than at this moment, we see the exposed the expression of what God is like - God's presence drawing near, God's way enfleshed in the broken body hanging on the cross.

     We see God's reign in contrast to the kingdoms of the world, embodied in the love of the crucified one.  The pierced one on the cross exposes and overturns our idea of what messiah might be like, and who and where God is.  God is here among the outcasts, and it is so even in our own day.  Christ will be seen if we look for him in the broken ones, the forgotten ones - those before whom we feel helplessness and revulsion, to whom we are called to give compassion.  Perhaps we do not even see them.  If you read the newspaper on almost any day, you will get an idea of who they are: violated women, prisoners, those who have disappeared in Guantanamo, veterans ignored and disabled in their return from Iraq, children dying in Africa, our own soup kitchen guests, the animals in factory farms, civilians, unnamed, dying in war, the old woman in a nursing home who has outlived all her friends and family, our tortured earth.

     On Good Friday, suffering is the first thing that is exposed, and sin, but love is exposed also.  The gospel writer points to the mystery that this exposure, this lifting up, somehow heals and transforms.  I do not know how this works; I do believe that it is not suffering for suffering's sake, but somehow suffering undertaken to reconcile and welcome in us all.  As Jesus endures the worst of all that evil can do, somehow evil is overcome.

     The presence of Christ, the Incarnate One, transfigures the whole human catastrophe so that there is no one, nowhere, where God is not.  Now from this large sweep, our contemplation might fruitfully draw closer and take a more intimate view, to focus on those with us who watch and bear witness at the foot of the cross.  It is only in John's gospel that there are friends nearby through the whole long agony.  Mary, Jesus' mother, and her sister, and another Mary, the wife of Clopus, and Mary Magdalene, with the unnamed beloved disciple who alone among the male followers stays with them.

     Jesus speaks, and he says, "Woman, behold your son.  Son, behold your mother."  He gives these two dear ones into each other's care.  It's a tender, tender moment and it also is only in John's account.  Some writers focus on the symbolism of Mary as a figure of the church; she is the mother of all believers, they say, and the beloved disciple is a symbol of those who will come to believe.  Other writers imagine the feelings of two human people losing the one whom they love under such terrible circumstances.

     What strikes me is how community is created in this terrible moment.  A family is made, not of blood, but of love.  I am reminded of a woman I know, asking her friend to care for her child, because she is sick and may be dying, or a young man, befriending an aging woman, whose family is far away.

     The letter to the Hebrews, which we heard read today, speaks to this when it says, "Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds."  Good Friday, among other things, is an invitation to kindness, to gentleness and tenderness with one another, to behold one another in our vulnerability.  It invites us to undertake new commitments in love, and to see where our commitment will take us.

     I'm reminded of the Buddhist meditation that says that in some lifetime every being we meet was our mother or our child.  As we stand at the foot of the cross, perhaps we see that possibility, that relationship, that preciousness in those who share the moment with us.  Perhaps we are asked, who is it that is given to us to love?

     After this, Jesus said, "It is finished," and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

     What is finished?  The work of God, the revelation of God's love that Jesus has come to bring, his one wild and precious life?  He gave up his last breath.  We may have experienced similar moments with the dying.  It's not romantic; it's excruciating.  Is she still breathing?  Is he gone?  There's a kind of a time out of time in the deathwatch.  You want it to end; you fear that it will end.

     In this most intimate view of Jesus' final moment, we are invited to bring our own suffering, our losses and grief, our own small deaths, and our own mortality to the cross.  We are invited to know that Christ is present in them, going before us, sharing in the human experience of it all.  We are invited to bring our helplessness and to trust, as the hymn says, "that I might fight befriended, and see in my last strife, to me thine arms extended, upon the cross of life."

     In his dying breath, Jesus gives up his spirit.  One of the commentators says that this is an outpouring of love to those who are at the foot of the cross, followed by the piercing of Jesus' side from which blood and water flow out because new life will come from this death.  But perhaps that is getting ahead of ourselves.  Jesus breathes his last and lets go into the mystery of God, as we all must.

     Good Friday invites us too, to let go.  To let go of our lives as they have been, of our cherished definitions of ourselves, of our notions of who is in and who is out, of old grudges, of our pet sins and our favorite judgments, of shame and the sense of unworthiness, of our ideas of God that have become too small.  We are invited to recognize that with Jesus' death, the work of redemption really is finished, and so we can receive the gift of open and empty space where there is room for something new.

     What will come is not something we can imagine and it is not something we can do; it is something that God must do.

     Dear ones, in this time out of time, Good Friday and the Saturday that follows, we enter into mystery, into darkness, into not knowing.  We look upon the one who has been pierced, lifted up, who draws us to himself, in contemplation and in awe.  We look on the suffering, the tender care, the surrender.

     We look, that our hearts may be pierced too, with gratitude and with wonder.   We see and we wait.

     Amen.