Good Friday
Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

John 19
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

We have just heard the spiritual that captures – for me – the crucial question of the day; this day, this Good Friday.  “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”  In fact, I’ve been thinking about that question all week.  Thinking about where I might have been on that wind–swept hill that day.  Thinking about how I might have felt, how I might have acted as I watched that agonizing trial and execution.  And today I have to tell you that I have been there.  I am there.  I probably will be again – though not in any way I want to boast about.
At first, I could only imagine myself a bystander – I want to say an innocent bystander – in the crowd that day.  I’ve come into town to buy the lamb, the grain, the eggs and herbs for tonight’s Passover meal.  But somehow, in the crush of other shoppers, I get caught up in another crowd that’s throwing stones and abuse at a small group of condemned prisoners, naked and bloody, dragging their crosses through the streets on their way to be executed.  And something in my own horror and revulsion at the sight makes me want to pull my skirts aside, to fix some great gulf between myself, a decent citizen, you understand – and them, the condemned ones.  It’s like seeing a bus marked “State Prisoners” on the side of the road.  An armed guard with a shotgun keeps watch over a bunch of convicts in orange jumpsuits as they pick up litter in the weeds on the shoulder of the road.  You want to keep your distance.  You want not to get involved.  But you can’t help staring at them as you pass by – as far to the other side of the road as you can manage – thinking, “How awful for them.  How glad I am not to be among them.”  And you drive on.
But that isn’t the only role I could see myself in that day in Jerusalem.  I could also imagine myself among the Roman government workers, maybe even an official.  Trying to be a good cog in the massive Imperial machine, being careful not to soil my hands with the dirty business of this dubious accusation, this trumped–up charge against an innocent man.  But we have to keep our eyes on the big picture here, don’t we?  We’re here to keep the peace, are we not?  And with every peace–keeping effort there’s bound to be a bit of collateral damage, isn’t there?  I mean, isn’t there?
Or maybe I’m among the soldiers – going about their business as if they hadn’t a care in the world.  Rolling dice for the prisoner’s merchandise.  Placing their bets on the things of this world.  Doing everything they can to screen out the cries and groans of the men they’ve just nailed to crosses at the top of the hill.  “I mean, it’s a job, isn’t it?  Everybody has to eat.  Some of us have families.”
Most easily of all, though, I could imagine myself one of the women gathered together on Golgotha hill.  Maybe not at the foot of the cross, where John places them, but a safer distance away, where Luke remembers them.  It’s a scene straight out of a hospital ICU.  Someone is gravely ill.  The situation is critical.  So you go, not really sure how you can help, but maybe just to show up, just to show your concern.  And the family murmurs, “Thank you for coming. You will never know how much this means to us.”  Then all together, among beeping monitors and fading hopes you pray – with every ounce of faith that is in you – that this one, somehow, might be spared.  That death, somehow, might be averted.  But Jesus was not spared.  Death came . . . and inside, you know, though we were sad, we were also relieved.  Just to have it over.  The long day of dying finally, mercifully, had come to an end.
Well, there are other groups I might identify with on that green, rocky hill, but you get the point.  Whichever weak, well–intentioned group I joined, I never really was with Jesus – on the losing side of thing.  Instead, in each group I found myself on the safer side – the decent, secure, self–protective side of things.  And anyway, what could I have done?  Nobody could have stopped it.  Everyone felt helpless, powerless.
And that, of course, is the point.  That’s the whole point of the cross.  While we were yet sinners he died for us.  For love of all of us losers.  While we were yet weak–willed and fickle, saving our own skins, breaking faith with the ones we love – He died for us.
And he did it all for love.
We didn’t get it then and we don’t have what it takes now.  We don’t have what it takes to love, to stay faithful, to be peacemakers.  But he does.  And he forgives us our failures, our weaknesses . . . and comes to us in mercy, in compassion, somehow supplying our need.  We can hardly understand how it happens, but somehow our deepest need is satisfied.
The late preacher, Fred Craddock, used to tell the story of a little boy who falls down and skins his knee.  He runs crying to his mother.  The mother picks the child up and says, “Let me kiss it and make it better,” as if she has magical healing powers.  So she picks the child up, kisses the skinned place, holds the child in her lap, and . . .all is well.
Was it the kiss?  Was that what made it well?  No.  It was that ten minutes in her lap.  Just to sit in the lap of love and see the mother crying.  “Mother, why are you crying?  I’m the one who skinned my knee.”
“Because you hurt,” the mother says, “I hurt.”  And that does more for a child than all the bandages and all the medicine in the world, just sitting in her lap.
That’s how God does it now.  He comes to us in our weakness, our sorrow.  Then he abides with us because we hurt.  Even now.  Even today.  Maybe we have failed him.  But he will not fail us.
Amen.
 
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