Good Friday 2011 at Carrington

A well-known story: A faithful old rabbi had a way of interceding for his people when they were facing some major misfortune. He used to go out into the forest, light a special fire and say a particular prayer. And this liturgical formula seemed to work, because the community usually managed to find a way through their impending disaster. Many years later, when the old rabbi was long dead, another rabbi from the same community used to try to respond with the same formula. He went out to the forest, but had to apologise to God for not being any good at lighting a fire, but he did say the special prayer. And the community's misfortune passed, as before. Years pass and another generation of rabbi comes along; he, too, goes out to the forest, but he says to God, “Well, here I am in the special place in the forest, but I can't light a fire and I don't know the prayer.” But God nonetheless answered the people's prayers and their misfortune passed. Again, another generation passes, and a new rabbi is leading a community facing dire misfortune. But this rabbi has to sit at home in his study, his head in his hands, and cries to God, “I am so sorry God, I do not know where the forest is, so I can't get there, and I can't light the fire, and I don't know the prayer!” And God says, “Don't worry. I will still do right by the people. Just keep on telling the story.” And the people, once again, were saved.

One of the things we are doing to day is “telling the story”, so that “the people will be saved”.

And it's so important that we do “tell the story” – because if you and I don't do it, no-one will have even the foggiest idea about anything to do with God, and especially about the God whose love for his creation is over-flowing, boundless, and shown to us in Jesus the Christ, the Anointed One

And it's an extraordinarily compelling story.

Of course, it's also an utterly gruesome story in many of its details. The Gospel accounts of this Holy Week touch and expose deep, repressed and depressed motives and emotions within the human soul. And the theology which fundamentally underpins this story often makes us want to run away, and to deny that this is what it's really all about. As 21 st century, educated liberals we think we have ‘better', less blood-thirsty theologies about this Jesus who is both utterly human and completely God.

We want to shy away from a theology which requires total self-offering and ultimately, the death of the God/Man, in order to redeem the world. We find a lot of the liturgical formulae hard to take; we may say the words, but if we are challenged we would find it hard, as 21 st century people, to own what seem to be very primitive notions about God, and about God's relationship with his creation.

There are some Christians, of course, who relish this sort of stuff: because it's Biblical, and because it's the literal orthodox formula they're more than content to own it.

But many religious people – including many of us here today – probably find it embarrassing to talk of a God who redeems his creation by a bloody self-offering, and by dying on a cross. But we, liberally-inclined 21 st century types, have to acknowledge the fact that this kind of imagery touches some dark recesses of the human psyche, dark places where only the most intrepid psychologists might dare to explore. Self-sacrificial death, for all its gruesome connotations, does really engage with human self-understanding; and, contrary to our liberal expectations it also affirms human worth. That doesn't make it ‘right' of course; but our ideas of rightness and wrongness are very limited by our all-too-earthbound imaginations. We do well to watch, listen and learn from ancient wisdom at times. We need to own the darkness, just as much as we want to affirm the light.

It's the kind of imagery that captures the minds of visual artists such as movie-makers. In the film “Alien 3” Lieutenant Ripley dies at the end. And she dies to save the world, as she plunges, diving with her arms outstretched in a shape eerily similar to a cross, into the smelting-hot furnace, hanging on with vice-like grip to the alien creature which has just been born from her guts. She saves the world by destroying the creature which otherwise would have taken over and destroyed everything. She conquers evil, on behalf of the rest of the human race, by her death.

Today, you and I - who last Sunday were king-makers, shouting joyful hosannas and waving our palm branches in welcome - today, you and I, for our sins, join with the crowds as we shout “Crucify him!” to the man who carries with him the sins of the world.

Of course, it's true that the respectable, ‘Sunday-best' side of our nature is ready to kneel with Mary at the foot of the cross. Joining with Mary at the cross is the best we can do.

But the worst we can do is also present today. Today we discover that we are linked by some ancient bond to that element in humankind that everywhere is as likely to misjudge our fellow men and women, as to be just with them.

Today we admit, if we're honest, that we are ready – all too ready - with the nails and the spear; ready not only to rubbish, but also ready to maim and kill the image of Christ - who is present in all we meet.

And even as Pilate gives us the chance to free Jesus, we join with the crowds and shout “ Not this man but Barrabas! Crucify him! Crucify him !”

Today is about not just the Sunday-best side of our human nature. Today is also about our violence, our intolerance, our hatred. Good Friday is about our sin, yours and mine.

And today, our sin is illuminated by the light of God's overflowing love.

If there's one thing about God's love which sets it apart from anything else we have ever known, it's the sheer topsy-turvy, upside down, joyful mess of it all.

The Jewish nation expects a liberating hero, a political messiah, coming on clouds in glory. Instead God gives them the child of an unmarried mother, a baby born in a shed.

So it is that Mary's child begins a life which is marked by reversing the ordinary nature of things, for his is a life marked by turning down power, renouncing wealth, refusing the urge to control .

This same Jesus annoys the religious leaders of the time by mixing with sinners. He causes special fury by associating with women of bad reputation. In fact, women play a very big role in his short career. And in the male-dominated society of 1 st century Palestine , this causes such a stink that the bad odour still lingers with us even today, as some of his followers still treat women as a race apart.

This Jesus annoys. He annoys by teaching that leadership is not about power, but rather about serving one another. He annoys by claiming that love is the only justice, that the poor will inherit the land, that in humility is strength.

In Jesus, God has shown us that he is difficult for us to handle, difficult to square with our neat little lives. This Jesus is also hard to square with our religious selves. For like the rest of the world, if we're going to believe in this God business then we want a God which the world thinks it can understand: a God of powerful intervention, a God who sorts things out; a God who – if God exists at all – could, if he wanted, stop the pain and the suffering. But in Jesus God challenges us to new depths of loving, and forgiving, and caring: demands from us new adventures and new risks.

And it is all too much for us.

And so we've come here today to watch him die. We've come this Good Friday with our Sunday best and with our daily worst. We've come today to shout with the crowd, “Crucify him!”

And, using somewhat creatively a key piece of Scripture for today, his reply to us is a cry from his Sacred Heart “0 my people, what have you done to me ?”

Well, what have we done to this Jesus?

We have turned the cross of Jesus upside down and made it into a sword. And we use this sword to browbeat, to persecute, to enslave and to humiliate people. We've used it to justify our inhumanity, to bless our weapons, to explain away the existence of poverty and injustice.

And so often the life of the Church is marked by saying a loud “no” to people, “no” to their longings and yearnings, “no” to their relationships, “no” to their efforts, no even, to their self-esteem.

And when we do this, when we say a judgemental “no”, the cross accuses us, because the truth is that there on the cross, God says “ yes ” to all humanity; “yes” to all creative longings; “yes” to all loving relationships; “yes” to all who offer their lives in love and service.

God's “no”, it seems, is reserved only for the exploiters, the persecutors, the dominators, so many of whom claim his authority, so many of whom use his name.

“0 my people, what have you done to me ?”

So often, it seems, the life of the Church is marked by an oppression of people - clergy who lord it over their flock and demand total obedience (and often get it) - and lay people who go around like Uriah Heap, becoming ever more 'umble as each day goes by; or who go around laying down the law about what they like, but then doing precious little to resource the life of the Church.

Yet when we do this, when we allow ourselves to become the Church divided into dominators and dominated, into leaders and led, into powerful and powerless, into doers and done for, then the cross accuses us, because there on the cross, God shows us that our lives are called to be the very image of God's self-giving love… and nothing less than this .

“0 my people, what have you done to me ?”

So often, of course, we have failed to do anything at all; failed to forgive, failed to let go of old arguments, failed to love, failed to grow as new people, failed to see the light of the Son of God shining in the lives of all we meet.

So often we have made God worthless in the eyes of others because we have refused to let him change us .

“0 my people, what have you done to me?”

What makes this Friday good is that it is a time for realism and honesty, a time for admitting that in spite of all our pretensions, we are, underneath, no different from the rest.

There is a painting by the French symbolist artist Eugène Carrière. Like much of his work it's a difficult painting. You have to spend quite some time looking in order to understand it.

At first the canvas seems to be nothing more than a blaze of colour and light.

But when you spend time with this painting and draw closer to it, you discover that the artist has hidden in the centre, under a mass of colour, an image of a crucifix. Then, when you look even closer, when you spend even longer gazing, you realise that this crucifix is being held up in the grasp of hands, that this crucifix is indeed held high on display by none other than the hands of God .

Finally, the full impact of the painting hits you. You see, at last, two faces: the face of God holding the cross, and the face of Christ crucified on it. And shockingly, amazingly, you discover that the agony on the face of God is even greater than the agony on the face of Jesus .

This isn't Mel Gibson's blood and gore.

For the agony on the face of God is even greater than the agony on the face of Jesus.

“Was there any sorrow like unto my sorrow?” asks the psalmist.

The cross of Jesus tells us that there is a deep and compassionate sorrow at the heart of God. The cross of Jesus proves to us that God is love. The cross of Jesus tells us that God is Christ-like and in him is no un-Christ-likeness at all.

And so today, in this service, we bring our lives out into the open: out before the naked glance of God who calls from the cross with an agonising cry: “I have called you by your name, you are loved as you are, every bit of you, you are loved even to death and beyond. You are mine.”

This is not the word of a God who sets out to judge, to condemn, to rubbish.

This is the word of God who loves us so much that he bore our sins in his own body on the cross.

God is Christ-like and in God is no un-Christ-likeness at all.

This is the word of God who offers forgiveness, fresh starts; a God who is ready to make you and me his children and to treat us not as rubbish, but to look on us lovingly and with total compassion.

And he wants us to do the same to others.

To do so, to love, to reconcile and to forgive: this is the way to life . This is the way to Easter. Amen.