Isaiah 52, Hebrews 10: 1–25
John 18: 19–37
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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts
be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our
redeemer.
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Today is not a day we want to look closely at the graphic details of the
crucifixion. For those of us who love the Lord, those details are
simply too painful, too ugly to contemplate.
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So, you notice that today that we are not re–reading the
eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ arrest in the g6;arden, with
Judas’ betraying kiss and Peter’s retaliatory violence.
Nor are we dwelling on the mock trial, with the Temple authorities
striking Jesus in the face when he answered the High Priest’s
questions honestly, or on the Roman soldiers flogging him with whips,
mocking him, beating him about the head – until at last, Pilate
caves in to the murderous intent of the
crowd . . . and signs Jesus’ death
warrant. No. We are not re’reading all those accounts
today. They are hard to hear and hard to bear. In fact,
though we read them every year, today we hardly know what to do with them.
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For we know that Jesus had done nothing wrong. And we’re
uncomfortable in the face of this chaos, this violence. It turns
us into helpless eyewitnesses of a spectacle we can do nothing to stop.
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So, we focus instead on the more poetic words of Isaiah – that
the Suffering Servant was wounded for our transgressions and crushed
for our iniquities. We read the prophet’s promise that upon
him was laid the punishment that made us whole. Somehow, putting
all the details in poetic language makes them easier to hear.
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Or we read the explanation from the Epistle to the Hebrews, a kind of
synopsis written many years after the event –
“See, God, I have come to do your
will . . . And it is by God’s
will that we have been sanctified, through the offering of the body
of Jesus Christ once for all . . .
And therefore, let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without
wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.”
These kinds of words – words like sanctified and
offering, hope and promise — are the loftier
words, the more comfortable words we cling to today.
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You see, just like the disciples, we run away from the more violent
details of the day. We avert our eyes. What we want is
an orderly world, a world we can understand. What we want
is for our Messiah, our Savior to make sense, to rise above the cruel
powers and principalities of this world, to rule and reign over them with
peace and justice. And the hardest thing to understand is that
he could have — if he had wanted to. He could have walked
away from all that violence, all that chaos, all that pain and
malevolence. If he had wanted to.
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But what he wanted even more was us. What he wanted even more
was his Father’s will. And the Father’s will, the
Father’s longing was to reconcile us to Him. And that was a
gift that would cost Jesus dearly.
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To sacrifice, Frederick Buechner says, is to make something holy by
giving it away. Only Jesus was already holy. So,
what he was making holy by going through all that mockery, all that
humiliation and agony — was us. And that is one more piece
of why we’d rather look away or run away today. We hardly
want to hear . . . that we are the
reason . . . for what Jesus endured
on that cross.
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But it’s right there – in the midst of our guilt and
responsibility – in the midst of our horror at what Jesus endured
that day – that we find the “good” of Good
Friday. For none of us rules and reigns in our own lives. We,
too, are subject to those powers and principalities, those forces of
darkness that Jesus also endured. And we, too, have known the
heartache of rejection, of loss, of relationships destroyed by careless
words and cruel actions.
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So, while we think we want a God who’s above these
vulnerabilities – what we need is a God who has gone through
them. What we need is a God who will meet us in the emergency
room, on the battlefield, in the midst of the broken family. What
we need is a God whose heart has been shattered, just as ours has.
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That is the good of Good Friday. For, beloved, that is the
God that we have.
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Amen.
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