God Friday

This may have been one of my favorite sermons to preach since last year's Holy Name sermon. I had the honor to preach on Good Friday this year at St. Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo, NY:


In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

When I was in seminary, I took a series of courses on the works of the New Testament attributed to St. John: his Gospel, his three epistles, and the Book of Revelation. The Lutheran pastor who taught those courses had us read the entire set of St John’s works all together, as if they were a single series of pieces. And by reading them as a single corpus, the themes that united them began to emerge, and the one theme that the pastor carried throughout the coursework was that St. John was teaching that the entire arc of God’s work and encounter with humanity is toward blessing. The Book of Revelation, in particular, though filled with terrifying and nightmarish imagery, is ultimately a book of hope. St John is showing that, as Genesis stated, God created the world out of love, and that creation was good, that it pleased God, that we lived in blessing. Then, the curse of sin, of rejection of God’s love led to human suffering, pain, loss, and death, and the original blessing that God had intended withered into a curse. But St John does not end there, with a lost humanity and a disenfranchised Creator. Through God’s action among humanity, through his coming among us as Jesus of Nazareth, the curse that humanity introduced is changed, changed into a blessing greater than the original one laid out in Eden.
And one of the most remarkable things about this action that God undertook, this action of pulling us from a cocoon of sin and hopelessness and out into a new life of deeper blessing, of moving further up and further in, one of the most remarkable things about it is that God accomplished this work as a man.
This is what we call the Incarnation: God becoming one of us, becoming human at a manger in Bethlehem, given a human name, actually a very common name: Jesus. In the Incarnation, God truly came among us in the form of a slave: poor, powerless, unwelcomed. But, the Incarnation also illustrates that things which are seemingly useless, people who are weak, creation even when weighed down by sin, by death, by a self-invited curse, even in our most dire and pitiable state, even then, ordinary things can be extraordinary. When we look at the ties that bind creation to its creator, we see that all is beauty, even the least remarkable. All is redeemable, even the greatest sinner, all is intended for joy, even the most destructive hate. Hard wood and piercing iron can lead to salvation. A manger can shelter God.
We can also be led to see that our pain and sufferings cannot be separated from our joys and triumphs. The curse that humanity placed upon itself was not transformed into blessing by God without first God entered into pain. This day, Good Friday, the day on which humankind commits the most abominable, destructive, and self-destructive act possible, this day is still named Good. The paradox of our vicious rejection of God’s love offered in the Incarnation, the very day on which we put God to cruel death, we still call Good. We acknowledge that in Jesus’ life, and in our own, our pain and our joys are not discreet unconnected events, but bound tightly together, united, like St. John’s writings, into a single mystery, a single a capella hymn of curse transformed into blessing. In the Book of Common Prayer, we use almost mirror language at baptism when we welcome a new member into the household of God and when we commit the body of a loved one to the ground at a burial. New beginnings and the end of a life are tied together as a single mystery, humanity lives in both pain and joy. As the burial service reminds us, In the midst of life we are in death.
That pain and joy is not unique to us alone, for not only humankind moves through blessing to curse on this Friday we call Good. All of creation is reset, is redeemed. The Gospels of St Matthew, St Mark, and St Luke tell us that for three hours, darkness fell over all of Judea as Christ hung dying on the Cross. Creation itself enters into the mourning of God’s death, every stone cries out in sorrow, but also cries out in the joy of the movement from curse to blessing. The clock gets reset at the cross, and the Book of Genesis is set anew. Genesis opens with the words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.”
Genesis tells us that it was light that God first called forth. That was his first motion in Creation, in setting forth goodness and blessing. But before the light? Darkness. Not a darkness of absence, though. Before God began His work of creation, God dwelled alone in darkness. Not a darkness of absence; a darkness of divinity. That darkness of divinity falls across Judea, as God begins again his work of creation. As Christ hangs from the cross, Creation begins again. As God on the Cross breathes his last, God says let there be light. Christ’s death and the return of light to the land are tied together as a new act of God in resetting creation. This death is the new first day, and the garden of the cross and tomb is the new Eden.
Good Friday, then, is not given to us to shame us, to create a bank of guilt in order to pay our debt. When we hear the Reproaches, when we think how we have rejected the blessing that God offers and have chosen a curse instead, chosen to deny God’s love and to torture and murder him, it is not guilt for our actions that God desires to well up in us: it is gratitude and love for His actions that he wants us to know. That is part of the category distinction between us and our Creator: we expect retribution for our crimes, we expect vengeance, wrath, payback. But the Incarnation, God coming among us, was never about our actions being able to move us from curse to blessing. The Incarnation was always about love, about God’s love for us, and the beauty of that love shown in the first day recorded in the Book of Genesis, and the new first day begun on the Cross. Today truly is a Good Friday, for it’s not about what we can accomplish, but about thankfulness for what God has done for us in Christ, in transforming our curse into a new and greater blessing, changing our shame into feasting.
George Herbert, a 17th century Anglican priest writes of the paradox of our guilt and of God’s love in his poem entitled Love, where Herbert describes his conversation with Christ on Good Friday:
LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'
Love said, 'You shall be he.'
'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.'
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
'Who made the eyes but I?'

'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.'
'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'
'My dear, then I will serve.'
'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'
So I did sit and eat.
For Herbert, and for us, sin and guilt can make us shy away from Love, from the God who welcomes us into life shared with Him. The sin that can create the chasm between us and our God is bridged today through Christ’s selfless outpouring on the Cross. At the conclusion of the service today, we will continue that conversation with God, just like Herbert did in his poem, as we address our Creator with the words:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.
When we offer this prayer, think carefully and joyfully on the words, on the petition we ask of God. We do not pray that Jesus set our guilt between judgment and our souls, but we pray that the cross is placed there. Our guilt, though understandable and real this day, is not the point of Good Friday: the blessing of a new creation through Christ’s passion, cross and death is the point. And we are not the ones who set the cross there, but God. Good Friday is not about bewailing our evil, or making up for the terror of the crucifixion, it’s about letting God be divine, accepting that our paths of vengeance and pain do not stop God from being holy, and that it is God’s love, even as he gasps dying on the cross, that grafts us onto the tree of salvation. God is never more divine then when He dies as a man. We humbly, gratefully, and in awe and wonder, adore the mystery of the cross, and give what we can, our love and worship, our service and our lives, to one who gave everything to us. Though Good Friday may seem like a day in which God is absent, distant, he is closer than on any other day. Even as we torture and murder him, he cares for and comforts us in our sorrow over our monstrous act of destruction. He knows that we are truly only hurting ourselves. Let us with Creation sing out today: both a dirge for the dying Lord and a hymn of joy for the breaking of the new first day. Amen.