In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
Jesus
Christ is our great high priest. Simply put, seeing Jesus as our great high
priest is a good way of understanding what Good Friday is all about. What
exactly that means will be the focus of this sermon. As a guide for these reflections,
we’ll use today’s opening Collect to guide us.
The
first phrase in the Collect is “we pray you graciously to behind this your
family.” This is the first way that Jesus is our great high priest – he deeply
cares for his family, the family of God. As we heard in Hebrews, “we do not
have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have
one who in every respect has been tested as we are.” The thing that makes the
Crucifixion so profound is that it is not merely a person who died on the
Cross; it is God, the Creator of all that is, the voice that spoke to the
prophets, the one who liberated Israel out of Egypt and guided them across the
Red Sed. And this very God takes on flesh so that the world might be saved and
find the abundant life intended for us. As St. Paul writes in Philippians, “Christ
Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God… emptied himself, taking the form
of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he
humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a
cross.” Jesus sees us as his family and goes to extreme lengths to show us the
depths of this love.
We
see this in the Passion narrative from John in several places. When the soldiers
come to arrest Jesus, he says “You’re looking for me, let them go. He does not
hide but hands himself over to fulfill his words that “I did not lose a single
one of those whom you gave me.” Jesus could have fought his way out of this –
we know that he has legions of angels at his disposal. But there might have some
loss. That’s the thing about violence, there is always collateral damage. And
so Jesus says “Put away the sword, am I not to drink this cup?” Jesus exchanges
the sword that could have saved him for the cup of his death because of his
care for his family.
There’s
also a beautiful exchange at the foot of the Cross. We don’t know what happened
to Joseph, Mary’s husband. Somewhere along the way, he drops out of the story,
so we assume he died, but there’s no mention of it in Scripture. This left Mary
as a widow. Jesus, as her son, would have been ensuring her care. But Jesus is
about to be killed and will no longer be able to fulfill those duties. And so
he tells a disciple, often assumed to be John, “Here is your mother” and to
Mary, “Here is your Son.” Even from the Cross, Jesus is creating family and
bringing people together. And though Jesus is clearly doing this for the sake
of these two individuals, is it not the Savior’s blood that unites us all? As
you look around the world and see people, even if it’s just from afar in these
days of social distancing, know that you are looking upon your brothers and sisters,
fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. We all have one Father in heaven and
we are all saved by our great high priest. Jesus’ saving death builds up the
family of God.
Next,
the Collect says that Jesus was willing to be betrayed, given into the hands of
sinners, and to suffer death. Jesus’ betrayal was about as severe as it gets.
His location is betrayed by Judas, one of his inner circle. Judas actively sold
out his teacher for money. Peter is more passive in his betrayal as he denies
Jesus three different times, even though he had been warned that he’d do that
very thing. Martin Luther King, writing from the Birmingham jail, said “In the
end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our
friends.” Though Jesus stood up for others, no one is defending him.
And
his betrayal cuts even deeper as we go further. When the crowd has the
opportunity to let Jesus go free, they chose not him, but a murderer and insurrectionist
named Barabbas. We know something that the crowd didn’t – that Jesus is God. So
this is so much more than betrayal, it is idolatry. Often in the Old Testament,
God is portrayed as a spurned lover. Here the infidelity is at its greatest –
the Lord of life is rejected in favor of a bandit. The sham trial which strips
Jesus of dignity and any semblance of decency ends with our bloodthirsty shouts
of “Crucify him!”
Jesus
is then stripped of his clothing, which was just as embarrassing and lewd back
then as it would be today. He is mocked with a purple robe and crown of thorns,
adding insults to the tremendous injures of being flogged. Jesus then bears the
weight of his own death as he carried the cross to the hill outside of the city
walls where he will be crucified. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice
to say, crucifixion is about as barbaric and excruciating as it gets when it comes
to execution.
Now,
you might wonder, why did Jesus’ crucifixion have to be so ghastly? An early
bishop and theologian in the church said, “That which Jesus has assumed has
been saved.” In other words, because Jesus experienced such darkness, betrayal,
and pains in his death, it means that he has brought his healing to any and all
of our experiences of suffering. And the Collect notes that Jesus did all of
this willingly and that is because Jesus, indeed, is our great high priest.
The
role of the priest at the time was to approach God on the people’s behalf. The
priest, by being among the people, would know their prayers of repentance,
their needs, and their concerns and those would be brought before God in the
temple. Likewise, sacrifices offered by the people would be offered to God by
the priest. And, at times, especially in the case of the prophets, God would
send messages back to the people through the priest. This is why Jesus is such
a great high priest – because he willingly took on this ministry at such a
great cost.
John
is clear to tell us that Jesus knew all that was going to happen to him. And in
John’s depiction of the Crucifixion, Jesus never stumbles or falls when
carrying his cross. In John’s telling, there is no Simon of Cyrene who carries
the cross for Jesus. No, Jesus willingly and capably does it all because he is
our great high priest. Having walked among us, he knows our needs, our desires,
our struggles and he offers them to God and perfects these offerings in
himself. In Hebrews, we heard, “we have a great high priest who has passed
through the heavens.” Whereas an earthly priest would take sacrifices into the
temple in Jerusalem, Jesus, as our great high priest, takes our prayers to the
very throne of God. And as he does so, Jesus, our great high priest, becomes
the sacrifice in addition to being the priest.
On
this point we must never forget our Trinitarian theology – Jesus is God.
Sometimes you’ll hear people who misunderstand what the claim of Good Friday is
and say that God is mean and sadistic for killing his son. That’s why the word “willing”
is so important on Good Friday. Jesus’ life was not taken from him, he
willingly gave it up. The Son was not sent to be a blood sacrifice, but Jesus
is God and so it is God that was on the Cross. God was willing to be handed
over, mocked, scourged, and executed on our behalf. The Cross shows us that this
atoning work has been done; that the Lamb of God has taken away the Sin of the
world; that you, yes, all of us collectively, but also each of us personally,
are forgiven. Just as a priest’s job was to make sure that there was a bridge
between the people and God reconcile us to God, Jesus becomes that bridge; and so
we know, without any doubt, that we are reconciled to God. Out of abundant
love, Jesus willingly undergoes this Passion to enact and to make sure that we
understand that we are loved, we are forgiven, we are redeemed.
And
so Jesus dies on the Cross. But that is not the end of the Collect, nor is it
the end of the story. The Collect closes by saying that Jesus now lives and
reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, as one God, for ever and ever. So
first, Jesus lives. Easter is coming. And we’re not supposed to pretend that we’ve
never seen this movie before – we know that Jesus is getting up out of that
tomb on Easter, even though today is still Good Friday. And so even on this
dark day, we know that Death, while powerful and depressing, doesn’t get the
last word because Jesus lives.
Not
only that, Jesus reigns. That’s because the Cross is where Jesus is exalted.
Those Roman soldiers who dressed Jesus in a purple cloak and gave him a crown
of thorns, they didn’t know how right they were to be doing that. The placard
that’s placed above Jesus’ head that reads “the King of the Jews” is spot on.
Jesus reigns as King from the throne of the Cross. And it’s written in Hebrew,
Latin, and Greek so that there’s no ambiguity about it. Earlier in John, Jesus
said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” That
word, “lifted up” means exalted, or we might even say, enthroned. Though the
cross seems to be a tragedy, it is not because it is by the Cross that Jesus
Christ becomes the Savior of the world and takes his seat on the throne of God.
And this is very good news, that the one on the throne as our Lord, as our
Judge, as our Ruler is none other than our great high priest.
This
is why we heard in Hebrews that we can “approach the throne of grace with
boldness.” My brothers and sisters, let us be bold in approaching the throne of
God. The reason why we can have confidence in approaching the throne isn’t
because of who we are, what we’ve done, what we haven’t done, how good we’ve
been. No, it’s right there in the text. This is the throne of grace. And we can
boldly approach the throne not because of who we are, but rather our boldness
comes because we know who sits upon it – Jesus Christ, our great high priest
who has passed through the heavens on our behalf, who has taken upon him the
sin the world, who has died for our sins, who has come that we might have life
abundantly, who comes to bring us into the love of the Father.
The
last words of Jesus on the Cross are: It is finished. The striving to be our
best selves is over. The fears over whether or not we’ve been enough are over. The
damaging effects of Sin are over. Death is over. It’s all been taken care of by
Jesus Christ, our great high priest. And so we can be bold in our faith, we can
be generous beyond reason, we can expect more than we ask or imagine, we can be
reckless with our love, we can forgive others, we can forgive ourselves. And we
can do these things not because we are able to muster up the courage and
willpower to do so ourselves, but it is precisely because we are unable to do
these things on our own that Jesus Christ as our great high priest has passed
into the heavens and has been made perfect, becoming the source of eternal salvation
for all. This is the true meaning of that verse that is often taken out of
context – from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, “I can do all things through
Christ who strengthens me.” The Cross is where we find that strength, the Cross
is what gives us confidence in God’s grace, the Cross is what frees us to flourish
in the love that is given to us. And so we glory in the Cross, seeing it not as
a sign of defeat, but as the throne of our great high priest.
