Please click here for a printable PDF version of this document.    

Betrayal!   Denied by your friends and your loved ones.... Fear.... Crucifixion .... and death....all the elements of a very fine drama. And dramas like this usually conclude with destruction and violence. But, that's not how our story ends today because the story that we hear today is the story of God's passion for us, a passion driven by immeasurable love and guided by gentle obedience, a love so pure and so strong and so eternal that it has power over sin and even death.

On that first Good Friday, when Jesus was dying on the cross, He uttered the words, "It is finished." But He wasn't referring to His beaten and His broken body. Rather, He meant that His race was run and that He had crossed the finish line victoriously. He had outdone all those who had doubted Him and tricked Him and wanted to see Him fail. In this moment, He was indeed the Son of God! At the hour of His death, Jesus was in so much control of His own life that He even chose the time when He handed over His spirit to God. After speaking to His mother and His friends, He said to His Father, "Into your hands I commit My spirit.... I am ready now." This is not a comment by Jesus that He had given up. This is Jesus telling the Father that His task on earth was complete, and that Scripture had been fulfilled.

In the suffering and the humiliation of the crucifixion that was meant to destroy Him, He was instead triumphant. In His final hour He proved to the world that His bond with God was united and unbreakable. And it's that same bond, that same partnership of passion with God, united and unbreakable, that Jesus won for us on the cross that day. But, we should be aware that a life in God, through Jesus, is by nature a life that demands courage, some sacrifice, and a willingness to allow God to work through us and to transform us. A life in God, won for us by the triumph of the cross, means that we will be a people who seek ways to become the voice of the powerless. A life of the cross means that we will have to, on occasion, forego our own desires and place the needs of the other in front of our own. A life in partnership with God, through Jesus, demands that we must learn to forgive and seek the forgiveness of others endlessly.

Think about the courage and the sacrifice of the people at the foot of the cross, women and men who loved Jesus very much. How difficult it must have been for them to stay and to watch as He suffered and died. We can imagine that there must have been the temptation to run away and to hide, to break away from the angry mob and the ridicule, to avoid watching as someone you love deeply is tortured and then put to death. But His friends did not leave. They didn't leave Jesus in His hour of need. They chose to stay there and to vigil with Him. Perhaps they spoke to Him. Certainly their presence was a comfort to Jesus. And Jesus spoke to His friends in return. They did not allow themselves to be victimized by the terror they were experiencing. Instead, with great courage, they permitted the experience of the cross to transform them and to take them to a place they had not yet been before. The friends followed the example of Jesus and trusted that, even in this dreadful moment, God's love was greater and more powerful than the fear and the confusion they were experiencing. Even in their deep sadness and their unknowing, they refused to be victims and instead chose the fulness of life.

Different time. Different fears. And different causes of confusion for us today. It would be quite easy to slip into the victim mode, in today's times, and just hibernate, hide away from the hard questions, choose not to be a part of the decision-making, and choose instead to blame others for the sorry shape of things. It really would not be difficult to live our lives in a cocoon or a vacuum. And, depending upon how you read the papers, the list of reasons to stay inside and hide seem to grow larger every day. We have planes crashing into buildings and kids being taken out of their bedrooms in the middle of the night; and there is the painful time that our own church is experiencing right now over charges of sexual misconduct and cover-ups. All of these seem to highlight for us a time of great darkness and fear.

But, Good Friday reminds us that, in the midst of all that darkness and fear, stands strong and triumphant the wood of the cross, to lean on and to learn from, the wood of the cross that at once destroys sin and death, while at the same time, unites heaven and earth. And like Mary Magdalen and the disciple that Jesus loved, in choosing a life of the cross, there will doubtless be times when we will be challenged to remain at the foot of the cross, to struggle with life's tough choices and to suffer through life's great losses. But, also like Mary and the disciple that Jesus loved, and despite our own imperfections, the victory of the cross promises to reveal to us the courage and the integrity and the humility that we need to stay in the moment and to continue to seek truth or understanding or forgiveness.

We have been given Jesus as our model, as the perfect One Who did not resist, or ignore, or blame when He was confronted with disappointment or disagreement or adversity. To the contrary, Jesus' eyes were wide open in search of the oppressed and the outcast. Jesus sought to befriend and to bring into the circle the broken and the hopeless and to take them to a place of partnership with Him. Because Jesus knew, and came to show us, that there is a deep and redeeming truth and gift in uncovering and embracing the suffering of the other, long before he suffered and died on Calvary, Jesus carried the cross many times for others, to set them free, to illuminate their unique giftedness and to teach us how to do the same. And, in doing so, Jesus taught us that there is no such thing as a meaningless moment. Every encounter, every relationship, has the potential for great transformation. In His time on earth, Jesus showed us how our lives are shaped by what we bring to them and what we take from them.

Finally, Good Friday reminds us that we can choose to be a people who, having rejected the cross as a symbol of death, and instead having fully realized the cross as a symbol of victory and triumph, we can now draw strength from that cross, and live our lives without fear in the fulness of God's promise to us. Amen.