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Sermon - Good Friday (B) - 10th April 2009
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping
Well, here we are. On our journey through Lent, we have not only turned our faces to Jerusalem; we are right here in the middle of it. Jesus has been at his most strident, most cogent, fighting battles against legalism under the nose of those who have learned to fear him, to fear the truth. Jesus has washed the feet of his followers, has broken the bread and drunk the cup – on the night he was betrayed.
He talks to God in the sweat of his agony. Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But God’s will is done. The Passion was so vividly presented in all its detail in Mel Gibson’s film that caused a stir some years ago. What is the point, many asked, of bringing this reality so close to our experience, rubbing our noses in the flayed back, the spitting, the humiliation and the crucial agony of the place of the skull?
It’s all a bit confronting, isn’t it? We mustn’t put people off. Let’s sanitise it a bit, clean up the brand image. We prefer lofty pre-Raphaelite images of Jesus stretched out on a cross, high above the gathered crowd, Adonis like, elegant even. Noble suffering.
Well, we cannot detach ourselves from it. This is no mere historical event. It is anamnesis, brought into the present reality. Our disobedience, our sinfulness, our arrogance is what nails Jesus to the cross today.
Let us not underplay the realities of Good Friday. It is the darkest day.
Approaching Easter reminds me of that moment on a long inter-continental flight when, an hour before the landing the cabin and its population switch into a very different mode. The movies go off, the lights come on, people wake up, stop their reading or their crossword. The flight attendants bustle, passengers queue up for the toilets with toothbrushes, toilet bags, and even a change of clothes. (How they manage to strip down and dress up in a space I cannot even turn around in always baffles me.)
The journey is almost over and we get ready for the destination. The bright lights of the arrival lounge beckon like the new light of Easter morn.
But there is the time between. The turbulence, the heaving to and fro as we get on the right path, the anticipation, our stomachs, ears and emotions react. Babies cry. Sit down; belt up. The thud as we come down to earth.
That’s Holy Week and we come to the darkest of days by way of the painful road of uncertainty, suffering and death. The turbulence demands a visceral response from us, a response that grips us at the very guts of our being; one with him in his suffering on the cross, so that we may be one with him in his resurrection and new life.
The truth is, there is no resurrection without the passion, the pain, the dying. Do we try to skip to the bright light of Easter hoping to gloss over the events in between? On our journey with Christ, we cannot leave out what we don’t like. We cannot dodge the cross and the difficult, unimaginable meaning of today’s reality. If we want to embrace the reality of Easter light, we must embrace, too, the unpalatable painful truths of Good Friday.
How have we come to this? The crowd of Palm Sunday was not the Jerusalem rent-a-mob who days later bay for his crucifixion. They were his followers. They put their cloaks on the colt and on the road before him. They identify him as King, the one who comes in the name of the Lord – God’s anointed – and peace is extolled as Kingdom imperative, what an echo of Christmas night. The wood of the manger finds its climax in the wood of the cross.
His followers; his disciples. You and me.
One can understand a fickle crowd of new fans whose belief in Jesus is a novelty, shallow and without deep roots, turning on him a few days later when a better offer comes along. But his disciples, his followers who have sat at his feet and embraced both man and message, how can they weaken now on the final lap? They? Or we?
We who are mature in our faith are the same disciples who follow him, who walk with him, who talk with him. And where are we today? “Is it I, Lord, am I the one who will betray you? Do we, like Peter, deny him, once, twice or thrice? And where were we, when at his lowest point, Jesus called us to watch and pray with him? Did we leave it to Jesus and, with the best of intentions, lie down and go to sleep on the job?
We have been through the desert of our Lenten clean-out. Properly done, we have taken the surgeon’s knife to those things that occupy the place in our lives that belong to God. We have chopped them away, shoved them aside to make room for God in the places of our being that are God’s.
Has our Lenten discipline allowed us to cut away those things which are dying, or dead within us, and which threaten our spiritual health if we don’t? That’s what repentance really calls us to do, to amend our ways and so to dwell in the temple of the Lord.
Elaine Farmer puts it this way.
‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up!’ is a direct challenge to face the responsibility of resurrection faith. To examine our actions and thinking as individuals and as a community of faith. To wonder whether we are too comfortable in our religion. To check whether we like the way things are in our church institutions, and, indeed, in our own parish, so much that we are blind to the possibilities of change and renewal. Most of all, to acknowledge as individuals the temples we have constructed within our own lives. The temples of possessions, pride and status, temples we love because they comfort us and reassure us of our own importance. The temples of the hiding places in our minds, where we store our secrets and our sins, hidden away, we hope, from ourselves, from others and even from God. ‘Destroy this temple’ challenges us to wonder whether we have fallen into the ancient trap of being so mesmerised by the temples of comfort we have constructed for ourselves, or so consumed by their importance to us, that we are unwilling to give them up.
We must think of these temples as we stand at the cross, watching, with Mary, Jesus’ blood drip into the dust. Do we equate their power with the power of God? Can we watch the Holy of Holies, the Temple of God, destroyed so our comfort is not destroyed? Or will we trust that the Word became flesh and lived among us—and rose, a new Holy of Holies, the Body of Christ, wherein we all have a place? Do we really believe that? For if we do the end of this Lenten journey must change us forever. Will we be strong enough to risk that?
We are all guilty of turning the temple into a den of thieves. We rob God of his primary place, too often seeking to make the church meet OUR needs rather than bending our will to God’s purpose. We rob each other of our own way of being still and knowing God, of singing God’s praises in whatever idiom it takes. We rob the world of God’s generosity and love, all-giving, unconditional, and bend that love to our own agendas and confining it to our own limits.
It’s quite simple really, but the simplest things are so often the hardest to grasp and the hardest to apply to our self-absorbed lives. It is a simple call to love, as God has loved us. The pattern of that love, at its most giving, we see in the narrative and present reality of Good Friday.
Rowan Williams says:
The life of Jesus has to do with proclaiming and enacting a disturbing truth: what is decisive is a commitment of trust in God’s compassion that shows itself in costly and painful letting go of the obsessions of the self.
That is the message Jesus proclaimed in the last days of his earthly ministry. No wonder so many found it an impossible challenge, even to the point of wishing him away.
We who have walked with Jesus into Jerusalem honour him as King, as the one who can be our salvation. We will doubtless find the limits to our individual capacity to live it out. We will deny Jesus and betray him. We will sleep soundly while he agonises. We shall watch the flogging, the humiliation, the nails and the final agonies – or we shall avert our gaze.
In all our failure to live rightly in the temple God has given us (look what we have done to the church; look what we have done to our society; look what we have done to the planet – God’s Creation; look what we have done to the economy; look what we have done to ourselves) we may well turn away in bewilderment and shame as we shuffle him off quickly before we get on with the obligations of our religious life. We will fall short of walking all the way.
But the crude, faithless temples we have built of, in and around ourselves will in their turn be destroyed and a new and holy place will arise in their ruins, holy not because of those who occupy them, but because of the One who raised them up.
This is the darkest day, the darkest hour. But the paradox is that its darkness lies not in what happened to Jesus. It lies in our failures. What happened to Jesus is the brightest part of this day, because it takes us forward. What we have let go, God today picks up. Whatever stops us, corrupts us, poisons us, let it die today with the Christ. In the death of death we shall find the light of life. Let us be thankful, for in spite of ourselves, and because of today, all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
The Rev’d Elaine Farmer in a Priest in the Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn