April 10, 2009
(Good Friday)
The Heart of Mystery
by The Rev. Carol Sanford,
Priest Associate
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 • Psalm 22 • Hebrews 10:16-25 or Hebrews
4:14-16; 5:7-9 • John 18:1-19:42
(From
The Lectionary Page)
And so here we are again today, looking upon the cross of Jesus: looking at this young man crucified. It is a heartbreaking event around which we gather today, made no less painful by the distance of time and culture. Most of us recoil from current news stories of torture and execution. Why, then, does our ordinarily joyous Anglican tradition insist that we come together year after year on this day to focus on this ghastly event from centuries ago?
Bishop Howe in a recent address to the clergy spoke about ‘Jesus’ witness to God’s reign.’ It is easy to understand the Nativity of our Lord as witness to God’s kingdom breaking in as new light in a dark world. We can see in our gospels how Jesus is a witness to the realm of God as he walks through the countryside preaching words of comfort, telling parables of forgiveness, gathering children to himself and healing the sick, but what are we to do with this, the crucifixion? How can this pain and suffering, this brutality and betrayal, possibly bear witness to God’s unfailing love?
How is it that we can see love pouring forth in this awful mess?
On Palm Sunday, Canon Sommer spoke to us about Jesus’ Passion and fear. It has been said that fear lies behind every ill of the world. Fear of loss, fear of pain, fear of humiliation, fear of injury to loved ones, fear of separation from God, fear of meaninglessness and, ultimately, fear of death drive human beings into all sorts of destructive behavior. Out of our fears we damage ourselves, the world around us and each other.
In living out every one of our deepest fears Jesus, willingly crucified, is saying to us in no uncertain terms that, ultimately, we have nothing to fear. He takes upon himself our fears, out of which grow all our sins, and gathers them into the darkness of his own pain unto death. And here, today, we cannot look away. Our religious tradition protects us from turning away and missing the pivot point of our great, shared story, the story of our redemption in Christ.
Think of the popular expression, “The crux of the matter,” meaning the central, most important point. ‘Crux’ is simply the Latin word for cross. Consider the very shape of the cross. What identifies any representation as a cross is just that, the crossing of two elements in some way. For Christians, the point where the two axes of the cross meet is, in the person of Christ, the central point in time where history and eternity meet; where human and divine, sin and forgiveness, hopelessness and hope, are bound together forever. Jesus on the cross is the place, the hour and the person in and through whom the portals of heaven are thrown open, the veil is ripped aside, and divine love flows out to meet and conquer human despair and sin.
We cannot completely understand this, but we can experience it. We let ourselves approach the astounding mystery of God’s Grace by not turning away, by one more time setting aside our intellectual questioning and even our own most elemental fears, not so much by banishing our fears and our questions, but by choosing to look at the cross in spite of them. We place our trust not only in the shining child of Incarnate Love at Christmas, not only in Jesus who healed the sick and blessed the children, not only in the one who turned water into wine and fed the 5,000; we put our faith not even only in Christ risen and ascended into Glory, but we put our faith in Christ crucified.
We enter the darkest heart of the mystery of our faith and so acknowledge and face, in the crucifixion of Jesus, our greatest fears. Christ is the way and the truth and so we follow him even here and he does for us what we are unable to do for ourselves, gathering us with him into the mystery of divine forgiveness and love.
Today is also the day we must look at our complicity in the sins of the world. Today is the day to bring all of these sins, along with our repentance, to our God. Only in this way can we begin to comprehend the fullness of Grace and freedom offered by God in Christ.
The cross is where time and eternity, humanity and divinity, sin and forgiveness, immanence and transcendence, shame and Grace and rejection and pain and love and freedom, all are bound together. This is the day we watch in awe and pray. This is the day we mourn and worship. This is the day we allow ourselves to enter here with him so that at the great Vigil of Easter we may know ourselves gathered into eternal life and so go forth into the world to carry the news that death and sin are overcome forever. Amen.
