In the name of the crucified God ✠ Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
When you go to the Holy Land, there’s a sign that you’ll often see at the front door of many churches – “Silence – No Explanations.” That’s a fitting sign for us to put in the front of our minds today. In Israel, the signs are there to maintain a sense of reverence and worship in churches that are often treated as tourist attractions more than holy sites. At any given location, there are sometimes dozens of tour groups in the buildings, and if each guide tried to point out all of the various things to pay attention to then those who were there to pray would be distracted and frustrated. And so the sign is there at most holy sites – “No Explanations.”
Good
Friday is not a day for explanations. The refrain of faith for today is “Behold
the Lamb of God who takes away the Sin of the world.” How exactly the death of
Jesus does this, we can’t say for sure. It is as absurd as seeing a video of a
terrorist group beheading a prisoner or seeing a photo of a lynching that
happened in this country and being told: “there is the Savior of the world.”
There is no explanation for this. As St. Paul writes, the Cross is a stumbling
block and foolishness to those who try to apply reasoning and logic to it.
Though
there are theological understandings of the Cross, what matters is not how the
cross saves but rather that it does. One theologian has even cautioned trying
to find an explanation for the cross because if we had one, we would worship
our explanation rather than the One on the cross. Jesus himself is the explanation.
To know Jesus is to understand the cross. And so instead of seeking
explanations, the cross is a mystery. A mystery is not an unsolvable problem,
rather a mystery is a reality that makes us question everything else we had
assumed was true. Because of the cross, we see everything differently.
So
when we read Psalm 22, it’s not as if Gospellers, in writing the Passion, was
scouring Scripture looking for things to explain what happened. No, instead Scripture
uses Psalm 22 to proclaim how the cross makes sense of everything else. The
cross reveals to us the deepest truths of God, which is why we often refer to the
cross as showing us the grain of the universe. In the cross, we encounter the meaning,
purpose, and direction of all things: the love of God that has no limit.
Throughout
this Holy Week, the Psalms have been our guide and the Twenty-Second has been
the central Psalm for this day ever since Jesus uttered its opening verse from the
cross – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When Jesus cries out with
these words he is evoking the entirety of Psalm 22. It’s not only that Jesus feels
abandoned on the cross but that he is calling into focus the entire arc of
Psalm 22 which concludes with the saving deeds of God. But before rushing ahead
there, it is worth lingering with this cry of dereliction, as it is sometimes
called.
We’ve
all felt alone at times. Perhaps it’s not knowing what decision to make, not
knowing who we can trust with our deepest thoughts, fears, and longings, not having
someone to turn to for help, or being lonely in a new or unsettling situation –
whatever the setting, being alone is one of the most inhumane experiences there
is. This is why solitary confinement is seen as one of the most torturous and
severe of punishments. Human beings are made for relationship and here, on the cross,
Jesus suffers alone, feeling even separated from the Father. Whatever loneliness,
whatever pain, whatever doubt you experience – Jesus has been there and is with
you, and so we are never truly alone. One early Church theologian said, “That
which he has not assumed he has not healed, but that which has been joined to
God is saved.” Because of the cross, we never have to fear that we are forsaken
by God.
Jesus’
suffering on the cross conjures up similar imagery to that of Psalm 22: being
surrounded by bulls, lions, and dogs, having bones out-of-joint, a melting
heart, and a dry mouth, and people gloating, piercing, and gawking at him. In
every way, crucifixion was dehumanizing and excruciating. Jesus suffered deeply
on the cross. When we gaze upon the cross, we might ask “why?” Why was so much
blood necessary for our salvation? Why did the death have to be so painful? Why
did God not find another way to save us? Again, we don’t trade in explanations
on Good Friday. But we can still, rightfully, ask not “how” the cross saves us
but “why” God would do this.
Psalm
22’s final verse tells us – so that the descendants of God shall know the saving
deeds that he has done. Jesus endured the cross to save us and Jesus would stop
at nothing, not insults, not lions, not nails to bring salvation to all. As we read
in verse 28, the result of this is even those who sleep in the earth, that is
those who have died, shall have a reason to bow down and worship him. On the cross,
Jesus dies and therefore defeats death. Jesus goes into the depths and undoes
death from the inside with his love that cannot be defeated. We will certainly
die, but that is not the end of our story. And verse 29 notes that the Messiah’s
descendants shall be known as the Lord’s
forever. In other words, we belong to God and are not defined by things done
and left undone. We are not our accomplishments, so we can let go of trying to
build our ego, our net worth, our résumés. We are not our failures, so we can
move on past our mistakes, our failures, our regrets. Sin will remain something
we will struggle with, but we are no longer enslaved to it and while we may contend
with Sin in the present, Sin will not define our future. Jesus goes to the cross
to save us from Sin and Death.
And
so when we hear that the saving deeds of God have been done, we have a sense of
what Jesus meant by his last words that we heard in St. John’s Passion: “It is
finished.” Death is over. Sin is done for. Salvation is accomplished. It is
finished. This is the Good News of Good Friday: that salvation has been accomplished,
so we don’t need to worry about justifying ourselves, saving ourselves,
defending ourselves, for the saving deeds of God are finished. And having been
done, we are now able to enjoy these fruits of our salvation. To do this
though, to see ourselves as the descendants who are God’s forever, we have to
remember who we are.
Good
Friday has often been seen as a sacrifice. One theologian writes about it as if
we are watching a child standing in the middle of the road with a large truck bearing
down on them. Why the driving is aiming for the child, we don’t know – perhaps they
are evil, perhaps distracted, perhaps blind – but those reasons don’t change
the situation. Then imagine that someone rushes in from the side of the street
and gets between the child and truck, taking the blow of the collision while pushing
this helpless child to safety. In this image, clearly, Jesus is the savior who
gives his life for the child. The problem is that most of us think of ourselves
as the child who is saved by Jesus’ sacrifice. We are not. We are the driver of
the truck and Jesus has willingly and knowingly taken on the damage that we have
caused.
Could
God have simply forgiven us for our sins? Of course. But forgiveness without a
cost is cheap, dangerous, and unbelievable. Jesus dies so that we can fully
receive him. In a sermon that St. Peter preaches in Acts, he notes that we
killed Jesus but God gave him back to us, raising him from the dead. We were
not ready to receive his peace, his mercy, his love. We rejected it and we
continue to reject it daily when we choose indifference over justice,
selfishness over sacrifice, division over love. Because Jesus allowed us to
kill him, we know that all has been atoned for. The death of Jesus is God saying
to us, “Yes, I know what you’ve done, and yet you are held in my love forever.”
This is why, as verse 26 of the Psalm puts it “All the ends of the earth shall
remember and turn to the Lord, and
all the families of the nations shall bow before him.”
In
Sin, we plowed right into Jesus and in him, God was God for us. We receive
nothing but grace and peace of God. God has always been with us and for us, and
the cross shows us just how deeply and profoundly and beautifully this is true.
The prolific Anglican hymn-writer Charles Wesley put it this way, “Love’s redeeming
work is done; fought the fight, the battle won.” In the 3rd verse of
Psalm 22, we read “Yet you are the Holy One.” That “yet” is what Good Friday
hinges on. It is the “yet” of God’s grace, that yet while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us, as St. Paul puts it in Romans. It is the “yet” of
forgiveness, that though we are hellbent on destruction, yet Jesus is forsaken
so that we might not be. It is “yet” of mercy, that though we may die, yet life
in God shall never end. It is the “yet” of love, that while there may be no
explanations for today, yet love’s redeeming work is done.
