Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)

This afternoon, for the second time over this Holy Week, we will gather in the chapel to hear read the account of the Passion of Christ. It will not be a new story to any of us. We have heard it before, as recently as last Sunday, Palm Sunday. The reading then was from the Gospel of Mark. Mark's account is the oldest and starkest of the Passion narratives. It drew us quickly through the last two days of Christ's life. The events were chronicled with an almost brutal simplicity.

But even if the words we will hear this afternoon will be familiar, they will not be identical. This time the reading will be from the Gospel of John. John wrote his narrative perhaps 50 years later than Mark, and his composition is much slower, much more reflective. John seems much surer of the meaning of what he writes. There is a powerful sense of majesty, of divine presence in John's account. But the differences in style from one author to another will not be the only thing new this afternoon. There will be a new revelation. If we listen well, the re-telling of these familiar events will stir up in us a new movement of the Spirit. The story will be the same, but we will be changed... if we listen well. It must be so, really. The account, after all, will be that of an act of God. And the telling of it a moment of revelation. It is good to remind ourselves of that, again this Good Friday. It is too easy for us, there is almost a temptation, I think, to see in the account of the death of Christ just another act of barbarism, another link in the bloody chain of heartless, mindless violence that has shackled us all since the beginning. Just another cross raised on just another hill. There have been so many. It may shock us, it may anger us, but it doesn't surprise us.

Too easy to let our reaction to the death of Christ be not much other than our reaction to the evening news, or the morning paper. I wish it wasn't so, I wish it didn't have to be so. But I didn't cause it, and I can't change it.

But if the sad familiarity of human violence can be a temptation to us to, in a sense, react too automatically, too impersonally, too tritely to the death of Christ, so too can the unfamiliarity of the fact that the victim of that violence was the Son of God.

If we are repelled, as we should be, by the suffering of Christ, confused, even ashamed, by the fact that human beings like us were the author of that suffering, it can be tempting to us to take an unreal refuge in the notion that Christ willed it so, that, as I said a bit ago, the Passion story is a narrative of an act of God, an act of divine will. That somehow the Passion had to happen, it was willed by God in accord with a design born in His own mind, a design far beyond our ability to understand or appreciate. That is a tempting notion, because it is a comforting one. But it is not true. Christ did not choose to be crucified. He did not choose to die. Rather, He chose to be faithful, even if that meant to suffer and die. The simple fact is that Christ suffered because human beings freely chose to torment Him. He died because human beings freely chose to kill Him.

So it is true, the Passion narrative is an account of divine virtue, the will of God, the movement of God's own grace in the world. But it is also true that the Passion is an account of very human weakness, blindness, sin. So if the images of violence are familiar to us, then so too must be the free human choices that allowed, caused, that violence to happen. If there seems to be an inevitability to the story of the death of Christ, it is not the nature of God that made it so. It is our nature.

Well, why? How can it happen, how can human beings bring themselves to the point of killing their Creator, and then congratulate themselves for having done well, acted justly, even virtuously. You may remember the Gospel reading from, I believe it was, last Saturday, in which John pictures Caiaphas, the high priest, as urging the rest of the Sanhedrin to realize that it is a good thing to sacrifice one man for the good of the people. And he urged well. In the minds of those who condemned Christ to death, what they did was not at all evil, in fact it was good, it was morally demanded. That is a chilling thought, and one worth repeating. Christ was not lynched. He was not dragged to Calvary by a rabid bloodthirsty mob. Despite the haste and disorganization of His trial, it was perfectly legal. He was accused of blasphemy. He was guilty. He had indeed claimed to be God, made Himself the equal of God. The charges were not trumped up. There was no bloodlust in His crucifixion, it was done quite impassionedly, only one of a number of legal executions carried out that day. Again, how? How does our notion of what is good, morally demanded, get so twisted? What kind of choices do people make, what kind of values do they embrace, that allow them to build, piece by piece, small pieces, the death of Christ?

I would like to spend a few minutes this morning reflecting with you on some, only some, of the human choices, the human values that make up this narrative. It is not only the mind of God we must attempt to approach over these few days. That will always be beyond our understanding. It is the mind of human beings. And that we understand all too well.

There are any number of powerful figures in this account. The Pharisees, Peter, Judas, Pilate, Herod, James and John, Christ's closest friends. All of them had a part to play in the death of Christ. All of them contributed to His suffering. Some of them could have stopped it. And yet which of them were evil, which of them sinned?

The Pharisees. Why were they so afraid of Christ? By the time of Christ, the Pharisees were a powerful group of men, a respected group, and granted a good deal of authority by the Sanhedrin. But they had earned their position. Their power had been forged in a fiery furnace indeed, their authority based on a history of sacrifice and service. The Pharisaical movement had surfaced during the time of the Babylonian exile. The people had been dispersed, literally cut off from the ministry of the priests, and the teaching of the rabbis. And to be that, for the Hebrews, was to be dead. So in a radically, shockingly liberal movement, a number of lay people took upon themselves the responsibility of learning the Scriptures, memorizing in detail the massive volumes of the Law, and themselves teaching the people, leading them in prayer and sacrifice. And it worked. The nation remained a nation even in exile. The Pharisees had literally saved the people from annihilation. When they were able to return from exile, to rebuild the Temple, their traditions, their teachings were intact. And again, it was the Pharisees that oversaw, guided the religious renewal that marked the return. They guarded the purity of Mosaic tradition, pruned away the pagan influences that had crept in during the exile. To the Pharisees, the powerful lesson of history must have been so clear. If Israel does not stay pure, she will die.

So to them, Christ was an impurity. He broke with Mosaic tradition. Nowhere is that more powerfully laid out than in the story of the Last Supper, the New Passover, we celebrated last night. Now, purity is a noble goal, a great value. So measured against a noble goal, a great value, Christ died. Why? Were the Pharisees evil? Probably not. Were they jealous of their hard earned power and authority, fearful of any challenge to it? Probably so, to some extent. We all are. But perhaps what went wrong, perhaps their contribution to the death of Christ was that they simply had grown dull. They had forgotten their own roots, forgotten what it was like to be the radical. They had become too comfortable, no longer hungry, and had become themselves the greatest obstacle to the goal they had set themselves so many centuries earlier. Perhaps they simply had begun to identify their goal, their value, with their own design for its achievement. Perhaps they had begun to assume, uncritically, that the purity of the people could not be achieved apart from their design, their efforts, that they were the purity of the people.

No, I doubt that the Pharisees were evil. They were just complacent, self-satisfied. They had lost the sacred spark of self-criticism. They had fallen into the trap of assuming that challenges only come from enemies. And in the face of that assumption, Christ must surely be condemned.

And Judas. What a tragic figure he is, really. It is difficult to understand what really moved him. Was he simply greedy, did the money mean that much? Probably not. He could have taken money anytime. Was he afraid for his own safety, afraid of the authorities? Probably so, as we would all be. But it seems so much more likely that he too held a noble goal, and that in his eyes, his way was right. Much more likely that his was a theology of confrontation, (what contradictory words those are) that he actually believed, in his misplaced zeal, that his own vision should be Christ's, that he could manage Christ's mission, force a declaration of power by putting Him on the spot. What a difficult man to understand. It is appealing to us, I think to believe that he was simply weak and evil. But probably not. If that were the case, he would have abandoned Christ long ago. More likely Judas was a good man, a zealous, dedicated man, who had become too narrow, too caught up in his own vision. That is a deadly trap, and one which snares the best among us, not the worst.

But there are many such men and women in this drama... puzzling, complex mixtures of strength and of weakness. Even Peter, the Rock, knew a moment of panic and betrayal. It is much easier for us to understand what moved Peter. He was afraid. Fear does terrible things to people. It does terrible things to us.

And Pilate. What an enigmatic personality. There is really very little said about him. We have to speculate. He was probably an intelligent man, an aloof, aristocratic man, very much used to the manipulation, compromise, and intrigue of the courts. He was an ambitious man, certainly. A politician, who had perhaps fallen so deeply into that mold that he had really lost the ability to simply face an issue as it is, squarely, honestly, openly. Pilate was too used to figuring the angles, the implications, of every move. What is to be gained, or what is to be lost if I do thus or thus?

He intellectualizes, he debates... What is truth? He tries to read and re-read the mood of the crowd. He weighs the release of Christ against the release of Barrabas. What is the interest of the Emperor in all of this... You are no friend of Caesar, he is told, if you release this man. Keeping the peace was a major concern in a Roman colony, Careers, lives, rode on it. The taxes could not be collected if a revolt was open. But then, Roman law was important too. Civilizations had been built on it. He could not allow a lynching.

First he tries to shift the responsibility. Do nothing, but make it look like doing something. He sends Christ off to Herod. Herod was the approved local governor, it was his responsibility to handle internal conflicts, when Rome's interests were not directly involved. But Herod was a weak and foolish man, by all accounts. A sybarite, a man simply lost in diversions, stimulation, entertainment. Herod is not a tragic figure at all, simply a pathetic one. He only wanted Christ to do some magic tricks to entertain his court. Christ would not do that. Christ very seldom is what people demand that He be. So Herod sends him back to Pilate.

And so the last resort of a cautious politician, a man trying to juggle too many concerns. Simply do nothing at all. One of the evangelists records what I think is perhaps the most tragic scene in all of the New Testament. I wash my hands of this. It is not my concern. At least this way I won't be hurt.

And with that simple shrug of the shoulders, the images begin to change. Images of dullness, narrowness, the unwillingness, inability to question one's own vision, give way to images of stark brutality. And perhaps that is the point. Perhaps it is there that the inevitability of Christ's death is underlined. Perhaps suffering is always the fruit of dullness, always happens when human beings make their world too small.

And so the cross is raised, because no one stopped it. Because so many people who could have stopped it, chose rather to hold that my vision must be followed, my goal pursued, even if crosses must be raised in its wake.

And so good people gather at the foot of Christ's cross and tell themselves they have done well. Perhaps we are not so far from the foot of that cross, you and I. As we watch the flow of images that make up these last few days of Lent, it is easy for us to tell ourselves that we would have reacted so much more nobly had we been there. The grim image of Peter, denying any knowledge of Christ, not once but three times in one night, because he was afraid. Would we? But how often have we hesitated, been reluctant to stand up for the truth, to speak out for what is right, because we have been afraid?

The image of the agony in the Garden, Christ's darkest hour, the moment when His need for human comfort, a loving touch was at its greatest... and around Him His closest friends falling asleep, too dull to notice or respond to His need. Would we? How often has sheer laziness, dullness, our preoccupation with our own concerns, our busy-ness, kept us from responding to the needs of others in the community, our friends... responding to their loneliness, their fears, their need for our time, our ear, our encouragement, a friendly word.

The image of Christ being scourged stripped of His clothing, His dignity. Would we do that? But how often do we tear away the dignity of those around us, with our words, our complaints, our criticism? The tongue can be a brutal scourge indeed.

The image of the soldiers idly, mindlessly passing time by gambling at the foot of the cross, at the moment of Christ's death. Would we? But how often do we hide in distractions, rather than recognize the Christ so near to us, in such need? How often do we blind our senses, dull our spirit, narrow our world with our own causes, our own concerns, our job, our own vision of what prayer should be, community should be, relationships should be?

So. There have been too many crosses raised on too many hills. We call this day Good Friday. Part at least of the goodness in it must be in our realization that it just doesn't have to be that way. Our world need never be the kind of small and narrow, heartless thing that lets that happen. Christ on His cross has broken the dull and heavy chains of self-concern that tie us down to too little. So if our reflections on the cross over the rest of this Good Friday are unsettling, if we are dissatisfied with how little we have chosen to be, we should be. Let us challenge that dissatisfaction with the sure promise that two days from now we will again be called, sent to live in world as boundless as God's own power, as full of hope and possibility as resurrection must surely be.

Readings: Isaiah 52: 13-53:12; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42