Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
March 21, 2008, Good Friday, Year A
The Reverend William A. Greenlaw, Ph.D., Rector
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:37

     In our Holy Week journey, we have come to the darkest day of the year.  On this day we are confronted with the reality, the starkness, the finality of our Lord’s death upon the cross.  And we are called upon this day, to try to take in the enormity of this event.

     And rather than attempting to fix blame on others—as Christians have done for so long—we need to reflect deeply on the human condition, on ourselves, and how we participate in Jesus’ death.

     It is so tempting for us to not linger too long on the truly uncomfortable, the truly unsettling.  It is much easier to treat this day as if it were an aberration, something to acknowledge, of course, but then to hurry on to the glory of what comes next.

     But the intent of today is to not do that; it is rather to really try to live into this event.  To feel the betrayal.  To confront the unspeakable torture and brutal death of not only an innocent man, but the one we would call Lord, God incarnate.  It is to realize, as one writer put it, that this event was sanctioned by the two noblest pillars of culture and civilization in the ancient world: Roman law and leaders of the Jewish religious establishment.  Sanctioned, in other words, not by the worst, but the best the world had to offer.

      I hardly need to say, certainly not in this pulpit, that an America so many of us yearn to love and be proud of, with so many good traditions and hopes and possibilities, in some ways the best the world has to offer, could similarly act so offensively, so brutally, engaging in torture and violence so unspeakably as we mark five years of a war that knows no end, that shows no sign of “success,” that continues to devour lives and treasure in a way that knows no bounds, and forecloses so much else.

     And many of us squirm today over how sound bites of sermons by Jeremiah Wright that totally pervert the whole thrust of his Christian message of hope and possibility and truth-telling are used in an attempt to destroy someone who is finally calling for the best in us, not appealing to the worst.  And how one of the most important political addresses our nation has heard in decades—where nuance and subtlety are used, as they must, to get at the heart and tensions within a plainly still-racist American society—where this is then used to mock and ridicule.  It all makes me shake my head in despair and dismay, yet again.

     Now it’s tempting to go on here, not only to talk about what those “bad” folks are doing out there to distort and destroy,  but to urgently wish—likely now in vain—that another candidate who comes from the same progressive, liberal Christian tradition—in this case from a predominantly white context—not try to pick apart and undermine the one articulating many of the same truths that have formed her—but rather that she might add her voice to a sane discourse about the racial divide that this nation so desperately needs to address openly and honestly.  I don’t want cynicism and despair to triumph once again.  And yet I shake my head when I muse on what lies in fore for us.

     But I have to force myself to stop.  For don’t you see the trap I am falling into?  The same trap Christians so easily through all times and ages and places have fallen into.  It’s talking about “those” people out there, over there—clearly differentiating them from those of us who have it together, who have it right, who are blessed with a nobler insight.

     Today, rather, is a day where preeminently, we, all of us, need to stop and look at the drama unfolding, but also the day where we need to consider our own complicity in that continuing-to-unfold drama.

     It is important to note that in the Passion according to John, in a very real sense, the one in charge, the one almost orchestrating the events as they unfold is not Pilate, much less Annas or Caiaphas.  It is Jesus himself, the incarnate one, playing out the drama that ends in his glorification and exaltation.

     It was Søren Kierkegaard who noted that there were two possible attitudes toward Jesus: to believe or to be offended.  If we are either bored or apathetic, we have not really encountered what is going on.  But if we descend into the depths of this day, we find another of the New Testament’s greatest ironies.  And that is, Jesus is not on trial before Annas or Caiaphas or Pilate, not even before the crowd that chose Barabbas over Jesus.  Rather, they are on trial before Jesus.  And, by extension, we are the ones on trial as well.  It is not what, in the end, they will do with him, or what we will do with him.  It is, rather, what he will do with them; what he will do with us.

     The late writer and Episcopal priest, Sam Shoemaker, told the story of a man rushing through the Louvre in Paris, seeing some of the masterpieces of Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci.  Simply not getting it, the man says to a guard, “What’s all the fuss?  I don’t think these paintings are all that wonderful.  The guard’s reply was short and direct: “They are not on trial—you are.”

     Now, if you think I’m being ever so slightly hyperbolic, consider the opening scene of the passion we have just heard.  Judas leads a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and Pharisees.  But before they can approach Jesus, it is Jesus who comes forward and asks them: “”Whom are you looking for?’  They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus replied.  ‘I am he.’”

     Notice both the “I am” language, so very important throughout the scriptures beginning with the burning bush and continuing often through John’s gospel.

     Continuing, “Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them.  When Jesus said to them, ‘I am he,’ they stepped back and fell to the ground.”  All present seem to sense something of the divine presence in this encounter.  The contradictions playing out inside the players involved had to have been enormous.

     As another writer put it, “this is the king going to his unimaginable and incomprehensible ‘coronation.’”

     But in another moment on the way, this “king” is flogged.   Flogging, or scourging, involved a whip with pieces of metal in it.  A severe flogging could easily result in death.  Let’s not skip over that detail too quickly.  Horrible pain, torture, abuse, and ridicule.  A mock purple robe and a crown of thorns—a painful parody of a laurel wreath.  And, presenting Jesus to the crowd, Pilate declares, “Here is the man.”  “Ecce homo.”  The New Adam.  The beaten, abused, ridiculed, soon-to-be crucified one—who is Lord of all.

     At the very end, instead of a “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” we have in John, simply and starkly, “It is finished.”  For John, this is not so much a resignation or a giving up, but rather an expression of victory.  The way of God with a creation that, quite miraculously, our God still loves.

     With this drama flashing before us, where are we, how are we implicated?  On one level it is easy to suggest the crowd scenes.  Of being caught up in the excitement of Palm Sunday.  But then, of being caught up in the excitement of turning on that inherently subversive one.  Of picturing modern day examples of how we get caught up in so many things, yet where we can so very easily blame as well.

     But to me, it is most instructive to let our imaginations carry us into the worlds of our forebears, those disciples who were to become the Holy Apostles.

     In that opening scene of today’s passion, Peter, full of indignation pulls out his sword and cuts off the right ear of the high priest’s slave, Malchus.  In John, there is no Lukan healing of poor Malchus, no Matthean, “those who take the sword will perish by the sword.”  Simply a “Put your sword back into its sheath.  Am I not to drink the cup that my Father has given me?”

     Yet this ever-impetuous Simon Peter, just a few hours later, when his word alone might possibly have made a difference, does not simply keep silent, he actively denies the one he not that long ago confessed to be the Christ, who not that long ago witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration on the holy mountain.  In the various passion narratives, we hear, “Your tongue betrays you.  Were you not with the Galilean?”  “Are you not one of this man’s disciples?”  “Did I not see you in the garden with him?”

     Can we imagine such a question being put to us?  Can we imagine how we would squirm, how we might answer?    But Peter is emphatic:  “I do not know the man!”  After disowning, after denying his Lord not once, not twice, but three times, the cock immediately crows.  How utterly believable are those accounts which say that on hearing the cock crow, Peter, that rock upon whom the church was to be built, and arguably one of the greatest of the Holy Apostles, went out and wept bitterly.

     At least Peter, and that other disciple in John’s account, stuck around a little while to see what would happen.  The rest of the disciples after Jesus’ arrest, in one of the most damning phrases in all the scriptures,  simply “forsook him and fled.”  Some Holy Apostles, there!

     In our ambivalence, in our wavering, even in our denying, we are in good company.

     In Jesus’ time, capital punishment was not meant to be painless, clinical, private before a very small, select audience.  It was meant to be cruel and unusual.  It was meant as a deterrent, filled with vengeance and revenge—with unspeakable suffering.

     Jesus was killed because he was ultimately subversion incarnate—on both a religious and political level.  Now there may be some who consider Jeremiah Wright to be subversive, but I don’t really believe that.  Most of us here—dare I say all of us?—are not very subversive either, certainly not in anything like the way Jesus was.  Nor are we likely to be.  For all of us have too much of a stake in an order that has, for the most part, treated us very well indeed.

     It was Reinhold Niebuhr in particular who has helped me to understand that, in Christ, we have a vision, an ideal, which we cannot really incarnate very fully, and yet which calls us into question at every turn.  Niebuhr calls attempting to follow Christ, the “impossible possibility.”  Or, as Paul so eloquently puts it in his Epistle to the Romans, the law of our members wars against the law that is in our minds.  “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it….   Wretched man that I am….”

     Using that old-fashioned imagery, in a language we don’t use much anymore, this is what it means to be enslaved to sin.  And a very integral part of that sin is in our own watering down the desperateness of our own situation, in our telling ourselves and each other that we really aren’t so bad….  ….in fact, all things considered, we’re really pretty good…., and on we go.  And let me make myself clear, to me sin has every bit as much to do with our calling to be good “subversives,” as much as anything having to do with our private morality.

     And yet, acknowledging all this, the final word has not yet been spoken so long as we are talking and analyzing.  The final saving act has not yet occurred.  And that is, finally, what this day is about, and what makes it “good.”  For at the very moment of Jesus’ death upon that cross, as the reality of the agony of Jesus on that cross hits us, we, like that veil of the temple, can be shattered from top to bottom.  It is possible for our earth, our world, our very beings to shake.

     The rocks are split and the tombs are opened—our own tombs of our own making.  The foul air can be dissipated, and our deadened souls and bodies can come out, come into the light.  If we want to come out, we can be transformed by all that is taking place, and know that a truly cosmic event has taken place, is taking place, before our very eyes and within our very souls on this day.

      “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  Were you there when they crucified my Lord.  Oh……!  Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”


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