Sermons at Saint Mary's

Good Friday
April 10, 2009
Isaiah 52:12-53:13
John 18-19-42

Almighty God, the breeze of your love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen.

One of the ancient practices that Saint Mary’s takes up during Lent is praying the Way of the Cross. Every Wednesday morning a small group has gathered to walk from station to station, listen to scripture readings and contemplate the passion and death of Jesus, and we did so again just a couple of hours ago. The scripture passages chosen for series of meditations are graphic in their depiction of Jesus’ suffering, and quite frankly, sometimes they are hard to take in, and I’ve found myself struggling as I ponder them.

The passage chosen for the sixth station is this:

He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from
whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of men. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.

If this passage sounds familiar, it is because it echoes our reading today from the prophet Isaiah, a passage famously referred to as the “suffering servant.” Hearing that passage as we do today, it is all too easy for us to conclude that Isaiah was foretelling the passion and death of Jesus. But that is a little too easy, too pat, and doing so obscures from us the real richness of what Isaiah has to say.

We do not know who Isaiah was referring to in this passage; likely it wasn’t a real person at all. But written to a people who had been carried off into exile, their Temple destroyed, Jerusalem sacked, a people who had strayed from the way of the Lord, this passage was clearly meant to be a reassurance, and a promise that they would indeed be vindicated. Isaiah calls the reader to humble contrition, and to awe and gratitude for what someone else has done on their behalf.

This passage make two key theological points that are relevant to our understanding of the events of Good Friday as well. First, the suffering comes from God—it is God’s well, and second, the servant suffers vicariously for the sins of the people.

This is, I think, where things get tricky for us. What are we to make of a God who wills suffering? Especially suffering for his own beloved son? It is hard for this preacher, and for most of us I think, to reconcile this with the God of love and grace and mercy whom we experience so richly. To understand this we must step back from the cross and remember where this all started—with the miracle of the incarnation. God loved us so much that God revealed Godself to us by becoming one of us, sharing our life in every way, so that we might experience in a new way the love God has for us and be transformed so that we might life out that love in God’s kingdom—both here and now, and in the world to come. But when God became enfleshed in the person of Jesus , despite divine perfection, immortality, and impassibility, it meant that Jesus must also take on human weakness, frailty, suffering, and eventual death in one form or another. And so when Jesus encountered the powers of the world, the powers of oppression and evil, his suffering became God’s will—not because God planned it that way, but rather because God created a world in a world in which humans are endowed with free will. And in such a world some people felt threatened by the radical love Jesus proclaimed, and hated his good deeds and words on God's behalf and said stop and shut up or we'll kill you; Jesus of course had choices—he could have shut up. He could have returned violence for violence, But he didn’t do either. Instead he took the world’s suffering onto himself, taking up the cross and dying an ignominious death. Jesus chose obedience to God, not because God willed him to die, but because God willed him to live—to live as one who brings mercy and grace and redemption to God’s people.

Just as the suffering servant chose obedience to redeem the people of Judah so too did Christ choose obedience to break the powers and principalities of the world. Jesus’ obedience—obedience even unto death on a cross--became a moral force, overpowering the evil of the world.

Our proper response to that is gratitude. Gratitude and hope for a world in which God knows no limits, and God’s redemptive power in our lives in infinite.

Amen.

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