Good Friday
The Reverend M. Fletcher Davis
We Call It Good Friday
Have you ever wondered why protest of Jesus’ death has been so rare, so unusual? Reflecting on that question can help us meditate on the meaning of the Passion story we just heard.
Who does not recoil in the face of violent death and shout, NO? Whether it’s John Kennedy or Benazir Bhutto, Lincoln or Gandhi, we recoil from the very notion of forging the future with bullets instead of ballots, violence instead of votes.
Four of America’s 43 presidents were killed in office: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. Two others, Taylor and Harding, died in office under suspicious circumstances. 11 of the 12 US presidents in my lifetime – all but one since Hoover - were victims of assassination attempts, some more than once.
Such despicable deeds violate our sense of compassion and fair play. Killing rivals is the world’s oldest political act, predating nations or kings. Every sane person cries NO to it.
Yet the best known political death in history goes virtually unprotested. To this day, the execution of Jesus of Nazareth is rarely decried. Yes, Peter protested his death - before it happened. But we find no record of protest afterward.
Nowhere in the New Testament is there even a whisper of indignation about Jesus’ death. Where is the objection? It’s missing. Instead, we find St Paul glorying in it. On Good Friday the world around, Jesus’ followers pick up Paul’s theme, singing, for example, as we will, “When I survey the wondrous cross.”
We fashion the instrument of his death into an object of beauty. We make crosses of precious metal and wear them around our necks and on our lapels as emblems of our identity. Why no objection? Why no protest of Jesus’ crucifixion?
First. We protest what we dislike, what we would rather do without. We would rather live without 9/11 and its horrors – the collapse of the World Trade Towers, airliners as weapons, threats to our security. We’d rather do without terrorism.
We’d rather do without governors who cheat on their spouses and shame their families. We protest betrayals of trust. We’d be better off without that too. You can make your own list of things you dislike and would rather do without, from pomposity and pettiness to favoritism and fear.
In the long history of Christianity, no one seems to have claimed we would be better off without Jesus’ crucifixion. Instead, in 2000 years of considering it, people have claimed that the world would be worse off without that murder!
Second. If our intellect doesn’t offer reason enough, we turn to feelings. The heart has reasons the head does not know. As we explore deep inside ourselves, we discover that pain, injustice and evil, even though not readily acknowledged, are all too real. They are part of our experience of life.
There where our raw emotions dwell, we discover fears of our future, defeats of our good intentions, pains of our failures. When we listen to others with compassion enough that they dare to share honestly, we observe the same darkness in other hearts too.
We long for a world at peace, a world where goodness and beauty and truth prevail, where people treat each other with love and honor and justice. We especially want such a world for our children, and their children. But we realize that in fact there is no such world. There never has been. There never will be. So we prepare ourselves and our children for tragedy.
When I was headmaster of a school in LA, a sixth grade teacher’s husband died suddenly of a brain tumor. One of her students tried to console her. “Mrs Seeley, it’s just not fair.” Ever the teacher, drawing on her deep understanding of life, Mrs Seeley replied, “Johnny, you get two it-ain’t-fairs this year. Sure you want to use one now?”
In her own experience she knew the truth of the cross, the agonizing reality that a good man dies young while someone with less promise lives on. Nobody likes it, but everybody knows it. Whatever people may find hard to believe about Jesus, no one doubts that he was crucified – an innocent man betrayed, tortured and publicly executed.
That’s a second reason we don’t protest. Who can trust a deity who simply stands aloof, demanding that we reject wrong and choose right? The only deity worthy of our trust is one who knows the agony and injustice of life first hand, one who knows the terrible cost of turning the other cheek, the steep price of loving God and our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.
Christ gains our trust and affection, even our obedience and discipleship, by proving himself One who weeps and bleeds and suffers and knows better than we do what the world we live in is really like, what the world we participate in making does to defeat our wishes for fair play and unconditional love.
Is that reason enough to explain the lack of protest of Jesus’ death? Maybe even knowing that he walked the Road of Sorrows before we have to do it is insufficient to explain why there is no protest against his execution.
There is a third reason. To discover it we must venture still deeper within, down, down, down to where our primal urges gurgle, to that place where a frustration ignites an ignoble impulse and a glimpse of beauty inspires sheer delight.
Can we make sense of the cross there in the core of our being? If you find it hard to believe that God can plumb the depths of your soul and make light shine in your darkness, that’s okay. Jesus’ friends there at Calvary watching him die had the same trouble. Then something transformed their lives from despair to delight, from fear to faith.
We know something people that dark day did not. We’ve heard God raised him from the dead. The New Testament trumpets his resurrection. We can’t think of his death without that. Now each of us must grapple with what we make of it.
If his resurrection means only that you are no longer alone in your inner struggle against evil, if you feel that you are somehow joined in your struggle by the Power that scattered the stars in the sky, and breathed life into chemicals of the earth, and poured hope into your fears, then that’s enough. You have already begun to encounter his resurrection.
If you know only that your own life is somehow touched by the experience of love, then you have already begun to discover that what might once have been a shout of protest against his execution is transformed into a shout of thanks. What else could set the cross against the horizon as a symbol of triumph?
The death of Jesus is different from the death of a president. When we experience Jesus’ love in us, we discover the gift of Life. When we discover that he is not dead but alive, he transforms our fear into courage, our pain into hope, our selfishness into love. No wonder we call today Good Friday!
We discover that in him we have courage - to rejoice in spite of pain, to begin anew after failure, to love in the face of rejection. No wonder no one protests his execution!
The centurion commanding the soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross beheld his love, watched him breathe his last, and reflected, “Truly this was God’s Son.” [Mk 15.39]
Inspiration for this sermon came from ideas I heard from the Rt Rev Bennett Sims in about 1965, when he was Rector of Christ Church, Corning, New York.
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