Preached at St. John’s Lancaster (God willing)
Psalm 22
Hebrews 4:14-5:10
John 18:1-19:42
“Surely, he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Grand-daughter Margaret told Mamma Monday night that “he died of our sickness.” She was more right than she could know at the age of four. It was the disease of our race, our sin, which killed him. “All we have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” There is a wonderful line in the movie “National Treasure” where the FBI agent in charge of investigating the theft of the Declaration of independence says to the protagonist, “Someone has to go to jail Ben.” As it is in the movie, so it is in real life. We have taken advantage of each other. We have killed and abused the innocent, knowingly and unknowingly. We have turned a deaf ear to the suffering of others. We have broken the sanctity of marriage as the sacrament which shows the world the nature of Christ’s love and plan for his Church by our sexual depravity as individuals and as a species. We have treated individuals made in the image of God as objects to be possessed or to be used up like commodities. We have stolen the fruits of honest labor and justified our theft by our words, attitudes, and institutions. We have scorned our role as stewards of the resources of creation and the image of God in each of us. We have in our selfishness disrespected God and each other. The list goes on and on, and all of us could add our own embellishments to it. Sin is a disease which grows out of selfishness, and immaturity, and the belief that all the world really does revolve around me. It is based in deception, and in our willingness to be deceived. All of us from Eve forward have been infected, and all of us had a hand in killing Jesus.
But it wasn’t just that we killed him. He laid down his life to pay the price for our ever so varied sins of rebellion against God. He didn’t have to, but he chose to. Somebody had to go to jail if the demands of justice were to be met. Jesus said, “I’ll go for them.” In prison and jail lingo he would have said, “I’ll catch their case- I’ll do their time.” That is the evidence of his love for you and for me. But it doesn’t end there. That same love that sent him to the cross to pay the penalty for my sins and for yours was so remarkable, so efficacious, so powerful, that it overcame the forces of rebellion and hell and death itself. All of the forces of “the world, the flesh, and the Devil” were put to flight by the reality of the love that Jesus Christ showed for us when he willingly hung on the Cross, died, and finally rose again from the dead.
That is why we call this Good Friday. There was nothing good about the execution of a good man on a hill outside Jerusalem. It was yet another example of the inevitable outcome of human sin, the sickness which infects us all. It is “good” because it was the beginning of the end of sin’s dominion in our lives. It was the beginning of the event through which God’s love brought us healing, and the ability to live into the likeness of Jesus the Messiah and to experience anew what it means to have the image of God “renewed” in each of our lives. It marks the opportunity for our habits to change, for our motives to partake in his motives, for the walls which separate us to be torn down, and for us to rise above the shame and remorse that for so long accompanied our less than godly decisions.
Let us on this sacred day remember that it was our choices and our rebellion which killed Jesus. But let us also give humble thanks for the love that led him to take upon himself all of the punishment that we deserved. Let us acknowledge in our hearts and in our actions that by his love, we have been given the opportunity to live lives of righteous obedience and justice which are pleasing to God the Father. Let us purpose in our hearts to consider anew the wonder of it all, as we anticipate the celebration of a joyous Easter Day. AMEN.
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