In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
On Ash Wednesday, the focus of my sermon was expounding upon the words of St. Anselm – “You have not considered the weight of sin.” Today, on Good Friday, we see the heaviness of sin on full display. The Powers of Sin and Death come face to face with the Incarnate Love of God on the battlefield of the Cross. My favorite work of art and depiction of the Crucifixion is the Isenheim Altarpiece. One of the features of this work is that the horizontal beam of that Cross from which Jesus hangs is bowing downward under the weight of the sin of the world. Indeed, today is a heavy day.
Our instinct is to turn from it. The Crucifixion is just as central to our salvation as is the Resurrection, but Easter is far more popular than Good Friday, at least judging by participation. This is our second Lent having a crucifix replacing our altar cross, and I know there are people who remain opposed to it. And that’s actually the right reaction. The Cross should turn you away, at one point St. Paul calls the Cross “foolishness” and a “stumbling block.” One of the leading theologians of the 20th century opened his book called The Crucified God by writing “The Cross is not and cannot be loved.” I am not asking you to like the Cross, I am not asking you be anything other than repulsed by it. What Good Friday, what our salvation, demands of us though is that we look at the Cross in adoration.
The Catechism in the Prayer Book defines adoration as “the lifting up of the heart and mind to God, asking nothing but to enjoy God’s presence.” Rome crucified countless people in their day, the reason why we remember one of them is because he was and is God Incarnate. And so if we are to raise our hearts and minds to God, longing to be in God’s presence, the place that our gaze is directed is the Cross. And so though it would certainly be easier to go from Maundy Thursday directly to Easter Sunday, that would not be faithful or true. Today, we gaze upon the Crucified Christ, and in doing so, we encounter the mercy and love of God in its rawest form.
Now you might say, “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m not turning away from the Cross.” And you’re right. You are here, partaking in the fullness of the Triduum. But how we approach this day is crucial. There are two broad understandings of Good Friday. The first is called the “theology of glory.” This approach sees the Cross as a means to an end, as an unpleasant but necessary stop on the way to salvation on Easter morning. If the name of the game is Easter and rising for the dead, then somehow Jesus has to die. So the Crucifixion, in the theology of glory, is tolerated, never adored. The Resurrection, then, undoes the Crucifixion and robs the Cross of its power and meaning. You might say that this is the “You have to break an egg to bake a cake” approach to the Cross. The theology of glory attempts, and fails, to rationalize the irrational. There is no making sense of Jesus’ death.
And this approach is quite popular. Consider all of the churches that do not have Good Friday liturgies. Consider the heresy called the Prosperity Gospel that is preached by people like Joel Osteen, TD Jakes, or Paula White – the Cross simply doesn’t fit into the message of “your best life now.” Consider the way that liberal and mainline denominations break out into hives at the mention of “sin.” Sometimes this approach even leads us to fetishizing victimhood, because once you take sin out of the equation, you’re left grasping at straws. And when the Cross is talked about, somehow it’s never mentioned that human sin is what nailed him to the tree.
The theology of glory is much more pleasing approach to Good Friday. It means that we don’t need to consider pain or betrayal, we get to avoid our culpability and sin in the story, and we can get right to the joy of Easter. But there’s a reason why that approach is a historical and theological anomaly. There’s a reason why the Cross is our central symbol of faith. There’s a reason why St. Paul writes about the Cross so often. Instead of the theology of glory, the much less pleasing but much more satisfying approach is known as the theology of the Cross.
A theology of the Cross recognizes the utter Godforsaken abandonment, shamefulness, dereliction, alienation, degradation, and defilement of the Cross. The Cross is an absolutely outrageous and obscene part of the Christian story. But only by gazing at the sheer horror of the Cross can we understand and appreciate what it means for our salvation and the sort of love that God has for us and all of Creation.
And it’s so important to not skip past the Cross because it is so irrational. One theologian has said that “The Cross is not a reasonable method of redeeming the world.” It’s simply not. No one would ever have projected their hopes and needs onto a crucified man had that man not been Jesus of Nazareth. Just think for a moment how ridiculous our faith is: we are freed from the Powers of Sin and Death because someone was humiliated and tortured 2,000 years ago in the Middle East. If it weren’t so disgusting and depressing it would be comical.
On the Cross, the Son of God gave himself up to be enslaved by Sin, shamed and rejected by humanity, condemned under the Law, forsaken by God, and subjected to Death. Having a theology of the Cross does not ignore the depths and weight of the Cross, but rather allows us to see the grace of God that flows from it. Here’s the story: God creates the world, calls a nation to be the Chosen People, then comes in human form to those people who then reject and kill the God who created the world. That should have resulted in the end of Creation. God should have rejected us at that point.
But as we all know, that isn’t at all the story of the Cross. As we heard in John, as Jesus is crucified, he’s identified as the “King of the Jews.” In the paradox of all paradoxes, the Cross becomes a throne. When the creatures want to kill God, God obliges. The result of killing God isn’t divine abandonment or total destruction, but salvation from Sin and Death. This isn’t something to skip over, but something to adore with all of our being. Borrowing from the great hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” the Cross shows us “love so amazing, so divine, [that it] demands my soul, my life, my all.” Yes, the Cross might be hard to look at, but it is where we encounter that love so amazing.
So if we are willing to understand that the Crucifixion really is as depraved and terrible as it might seem, what is it that we see there? The way that the earliest Church understood the Crucifixion was as recapitulation. To “recapitulate” is to tell an old story in a new way, and that is exactly what the Cross is all about. The short version of it is this: in Adam, things did not go as planned. Even if you view Adam metaphorically, it’s fairly obvious that just within the first few chapters of Genesis that things have gotten off track. God is disobeyed, Cain murders his brother, humanity tries to build a tower to overthrow God, and God has second thoughts about the whole thing and sends a flood to start the whole thing over again, which doesn’t really work.
The story of human sin hasn’t really changed much – the story of human history is largely a story of war, slavery, economic and environmental degradation, selfishness, and greed. Sure, humanity has had some bright spots, but no one looks around the world and says “This is great.” It’s not a script that we could rewrite. No matter how much we want to change the story, we can’t. So God, in Christ, retells the story for us. Understanding the Cross as recapitulation means that Jesus is the New Adam who has reconciled us to God and to each other. No longer are we enslaved to sin, no longer is salvation dependent on our action, no longer is death final.
But this rectifying of our brokenness only comes from Christ being fully broken. On the Cross, Jesus went as deep into the brokenness of life as it gets. And by going to those depths, he brings his blessing with him. He paves the way from the places of estrangement back to God. He makes the dead ends of Sin and Death to be roundabouts to bring us to God.
Now, I’m not so naïve as to think that Sin is no longer a problem or that Death is no longer an enemy. But it cannot be overlooked that in Christ, a new way has been opened for us. The grace of God is that we are able to participate in this recapitulated history. We can be a part of the New Creation. Because the Righteous gave himself up for the unrighteous, because the Godly died for the ungodly, there is nothing that we have to do to earn our entrance to this new way of being. We don’t have to pave the road back to God, it has been done for us.
On the Cross, God rewrites the story and through our Baptisms, we become a part of that story. As I’ve said already in this Triduum, the liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and the Easter Vigil are all a part of one story. Good Friday is not the definitive representation of our salvation, nor is Easter. The whole of the Triduum reveals our salvation. In this Good Friday part of that story, we see what it is that we enter into, namely the depths of human sin. Christ enters fully into that broken story and redeems it with his gracious glory. At the Vigil, when we renew our Baptismal vows, we will enter more fully into this salvation as we become alive in Christ’s new story. Christ descends fully into our brokenness so that we might arise with him fully into his glory. Christ’s story is one of grace, love, and peace which pass all understanding, and on the Cross, his redeeming story becomes ours as he enters fully into the depths of our broken story.
But for Christ’s story of redemption and overcoming of Sin and Death to be a part of our story, we have to give our adoration to the Cross, acknowledging that Sin was not a minor problem, but rather took God’s own death to reconcile. On Good Friday, we look to the Cross and thereby see the fullness of God’s love, which is our truest story.
In the Good Friday liturgy, a hymn often follows the sermon. In just a moment, we will sing the classic English hymn Love Unknown. Consider these sacred words and let them dwell in your heart: “My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love to me, love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be…. Here might I stay and sing, no story so divine: never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine. This is my friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly sing.” May it be our song of adoration to our Crucified Christ. Amen.
