The Lessons Appointed for Use on Good Friday

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

After looking at altarpieces, reading poetry, and singing hymns about the crucifixion, my words will fall far too short of the task set before me today. How could I do better than the simple words of “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” or the glorious chorale of “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded”? So I’m going to copy a friend of mine at seminary in Virginia who opened his sermon today with words not of his own but from W.H. Auden’s first poem of the “Two Songs of Hedli Anderson”:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

In so many ways, our only response to Good Friday, to being faced with the cross, is silence.

On Good Friday, we contemplate the cross. Not the empty cross, the one that resides in our churches to remind us that Jesus is risen, that he no longer hangs from the cross. Not the sterilized and safe cross of popular culture, the one that we see rap musicians and celebrities wear encrusted with diamonds. Today we contemplate the cross as what it was, a torture device, a means for putting the worst of the worst criminals to death, and the site of the death and suffering of the Son of God as well as the site of our salvation and redemption.

A commentator on NPR, Elizabeth Scalia, spoke today about why she remains a Catholic in spite of the very public and grievous acts of child molestation that occurred within and were covered up by the church. She speaks of how darkness and light are always intertwined, how the church has been a beacon of light for many as the flip side to these awful acts. The cross is the very manifestation of the enmeshment of light and dark – both a violent tool of destruction and where our sins our atoned for. We are surrounded by this dichotomy in the world and in our faith. As Ms. Scalia notes, America gives more money to the rest of the world than any other country. We are also the only country to detonate an atomic weapon. Our government was founded on principles of personal liberty, and many of those founders owned slaves. For a chaplain at Baptist hospital, this was embodied in his father’s leather doctor’s bag. That bag represented a man who selflessly treated other people’s health and was a respected citizen. That bag was also where he hid his alcohol.

The pure awfulness of the cross is where we see the depth and magnitude of God’s love for us. That is why it is the predominant Christian symbol. That is why we come forward to venerate the cross, why people weep tears of joy and sadness on this day. Because God loved the world so much that God gave God’s only Son, not just to dwell amongst us but to be sacrificed for us, to atone not simply for our individual sins but to transform our very being as sinners. And because no words can possibly express our gratitude and love and thankfulness to God, we try to live out our lives in a spirit of thankfulness and love. And we are awed into silence by this great gift, the gift of forgiveness and wholeness, that comes through the most horrible means we can imagine. Amen.

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