Sermon — Good Friday, March 29, 2024
Michael Fenn
There is an uncomfortable question that Good Friday brings up for me. Maybe you have thought this at one point or another. It feels almost blasphemous to really ask. For me, a question I have come back to from time to time is: Why exactly did Jesus have to die?. What I mean, is that, in theory, could the whole story of Christianity have been:
-Jesus, Son of God, comes down and tells everyone to behave, be kind, and love one
another
-Jesus tells us all we are saved
-Jesus goes back up into heaven on a chariot of fire
Instead, Jesus dies a terrifying and horrific death where a good many people are implicated–Judas, Pontius Pilate, the Roman Empire writ large, and even the crowds of people who welcomed him into Jerusalem just five days before. It is a strange thing to grapple with, a strange horror we as Christians revisit year after year.
It is difficult to know what to do with this sense of horror, how to find a spot for it in our souls. It is tempting to use it to immediately point to its conclusion: the resurrection. It is tempting to not really take it personally. It is tempting to acknowledge the scariness, let it be uncomfortable, and then to let it just pass. I am going to challenge us who have physcially come to church today, or are listening to this sermon online, to let Good Friday really sink in, to take Good Friday personally, and to allow it its due time.
In the spirit of that, I will recite for you all a poem I feel is pretty apt at capturing the tone of Good Friday. It is “In the Desert” by Stephen Crane. I will read it for you two times, because you don’t have the text in front of you.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
I read this because to me, it captures the essence of what makes Good Friday so discomforting to us as people. In the poem, we see a beast with no redeeming qualities, completely occupied with one thing, and devoid of anything else. This beast, which was once likely a man, is utterly and completely devoted to one singular act. Devouring his own bitter heart, and relishing in that action.
In Good Friday, we as people face our darkest moment as Christians, when Jesus is crucified. When the crowds that yelled “hosanna” five days ago on Palm Sunday now scream for the violent, gory death of Jesus as they scream “crucify him”. Here is where Good Friday gets so disconcerting. We are seen in the crowd that betrays Jesus, and we are seen in the beast that eats its own bitter heart. The dark discomfort of Good Friday becomes personal to us, if we let it sink in. We are culpable in the violence and death that take place.
This returns me to my original question, Why did Jesus have to die?
Many theologians, pastors, and church fathers have wrestled with and addressed this question. The answer that you land on depends heavily on the time period, the denomination, and the person you ask. However, the general consensus is that Jesus had to die for our sins. But the actual meaning of that is still unclear. And, if you think about it, paints a picture of God the Father who demands death and destruction. And sort of goes against the idea of a loving God that Jesus and the scriptures tell us about. What gives. One thing I have learned in seminary is that a way of understanding a belief in God is to understand that by believing in God, we are making a statement that God is an inherently trustworthy person. A bloodthirsty God demanding the suffering and death of Jesus does not seem like a God I can trust.
Rather than a bloodthirsty God who accepts Jesus’ suffering as a substitute for our own. Who accepts Jesus’s death as a payment for our sins–which treats sin and redemption as almost an economic action. There is another way of looking at it that does not contrast the loving God of the scriptures. One where the perspective is one of trust and belief, rather than fear and deferred punishment. I will invite us to skew our perspective in this way. I will invite us into the perspective of the crowd that called for his crucifixion. The crowd that represents us on Good Friday.
In this perspective, we can understand that instead of Jesus’ death as a payment. We understand that in going to the cross, Jesus takes our sins to the cross with him. In the words of Archbishop Rowan Williams–the cross is the negation of negation, the killing of our desire to kill. We have shown our deep human bitterness and that is what is destroyed on the cross. In the crucifixion we attempted to kill love and thus our hatred was killed. In this thinking, to return my my original question, Jesus had to die becuase we had to kill him. It was the extremity of our hatred, bitterness, and violence that led to the crucifixion. And almost paradoxically, it is the crucifixion that defeats all of this violence.
To return to the poem I read to you all. The crucifixion takes us out of our own bitter self-absorption, and destroys that which makes us bitter, destroys that which makes us evil. We get a chance to repent of what makes us so bitter, so self absorbed, so hurtful by the saving action of Jesus. God sees that darkness, destroys it, and gives us another chance again and again–particularly in the darkness of Good Friday.
Good Friday at its core, tells us that no matter how extreme our violence, how deep our hatred goes, how hot our anger, how shameful our pride, God does not abandon us, God is still working with us. It is an uncomfortable truth to hold and to face, that we as good Christians have many parts of ourselves that are angry, violent, fearful, and dark; and God sees that, and these desolate aspects of our human condition are what is nailed to the cross.
This is the good news of this dark day, that as we acknowledge the darkness of the day, God accepts that for what it is, accepts us for who we are. Our deep horrors are transfixed to the cross. I do not wish in preaching this to skip over the darkness of this day. It is necessary to experience this darkness. Witness our own darkness. Witness the terror of this day. The ressurrection after all, cannot exist without it. However, as we wait for the resurrection, which will come in its due time, we can know that, God is here with us in this darkness. In the name of the one who loved us first.