Sermon transcript:
What are we to make of this oddly named day? Where is the grace? It’s hard to see. And we have to be careful—careful not to hold up someone’s torture and execution as somehow redemptive. That’s one of the dangers of orthodox belief: the idea that God sent Jesus solely or mostly to die for the forgiveness of sins.
The New Testament writers found the good in this day not in the suffering itself, but in what it signified: a new covenant with God. Good Friday marks the beginning of that covenant spoken of by the prophet Jeremiah—that God would write the law not on tablets of stone but on our hearts, that God would forgive our sins completely and restore the broken relationship between us forever. The relationship with God would no longer depend on human faithfulness or obedience. Even if we kill God, God will not let us go.
Many of us in the liberal Christian tradition have gravitated to another understanding—the idea that what is good is not Jesus’ death, but his life. Barbara Brown Taylor puts it beautifully when she writes that perhaps God’s will for Jesus was “a long and fruitful life, brimming over with the divine justice and love he was born to embody.” When the world resisted that justice and reviled that love, she says, God’s will did not give Jesus permission to stop being himself. God’s will sustained him—to keep doing justice, to keep loving mercy, even when it cost him everything. In the end, she writes, suffering and death became the unavoidable consequences of being who he was. God’s will for Jesus was to be fully himself every day of his life—even if the fullness of that life shortened its length.1
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, isn’t it? Because Good Friday, regardless of our theology, doesn’t make sense without Easter. And we’re not there yet. Maybe today isn’t about making sense at all. Maybe today is simply about sitting in the bewilderment, the grief, and the guilt of it all. Maybe it’s about sitting with the questions:
How is any of this good?
How did we get from the elation of Palm Sunday to the brutality of today?
What could justify the execution of this healer, this teacher, this prophet?
How could God let this happen?
How is it that we keep letting love get crucified?
Maybe that’s our task on Good Friday, to sit with the whirlwind of emotions and questions. Perhaps the best we can do is a kind of solidarity with Jesus, who emptied himself so that he might do God’s will. Perhaps, in emptying ourselves of the need for explanation or certainty, we might truly be present to this day. Because maybe—just maybe—it’s in that empty space of unknowing that there is room for God to enter and redeem what feels unredeemable. That’s why faith matters if we are to face the horrors of this day.
Not faith as belief—gleaning information from a correct set of beliefs—but faith as surrender into a relationship of trust in relationship. Faith that is not about having the answers, but about placing your life—your questions, your fear, your grief—in God’s hands.
So as we embrace this day fully—still bewildered, still aching—may you have the courage to sit with all that is not yet resolved.
May the questions of this day open, not close, your heart: how could we crucify love, and how could love still choose us in return?
When grace seems hidden and hope feels far, may the Holy One write again upon your heart: love that cannot be erased, forgiveness that does not depend on our faithfulness.
May you find companionship with the One who would not cease being love, even when it cost him everything.
And as we wait in the unknowing between death and dawn, may a quiet faith keep watch with you—not the faith of answers, but the faith of surrender and trust.
Amen.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 Barbara Brown Taylor, My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?, http://www.explorefaith.org/themes/easter/taylor_1.html, April 21, 2000.