29 March 2024 Good Friday

Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10.16-25; John 18.1-19.42

Good Friday.  But is it good.  what is good about it, because I cannot see any good in the abandonment, abuse and absence we find in Psalm 22, or even in our gospel and the first reading.  Between Isaiah’s suffering servant, Jesus on the Cross and the forlorn believer in the Psalm, there is almost more suffering there than we can bear.  Yet, we need to recognise that our difficulty dealing with this is partly due to our social, political, and economic privileges.

I doubt many of us have experienced the trauma described in these passages, yet we know the cross is a pervasive reality in human experience, whether we see it in terms of the victims of terrorist acts; oppression and persecution; political violence and upheaval; or malnutrition and famine.  We also know that few of us will escape facing our own diminishment and mortality, and that we all need a divine companion to give us hope and courage when we are walking through the valley of the shadow.

Were you there when they Crucified my Lord is the quintessential Good Friday hymn, but of course none of us were physically there.  Yet, we are all part of an ambiguous history that has persecuted prophets and promoted celebrities.  Today, on this day, we can reflect on all the small crucifixions that are occurring in our world, some unnoticed, but still they remain very real, - death dealing actions that lead to melting polar icecaps, global climate change and the potential cataclysm that awaits our children and children’s children, complacency at mass starvation and genocide, apathy at sex trafficking and human slavery, and many more, and then we could reflect on our own personal ambiguities and culpability in the subtle violence of everyday life.

The passion of Christ, as described by John, is not an invitation to passively “let Jesus do it for us”, it is a challenge to action, to creative and loving confrontation of the evils in our time.  It awakens us to our own complicity as well as our own suffering and the suffering of others.  We don’t need more crosses in our world.  We need healing of the wounded, of the marginalised, or the abused and the forgotten.  The goodness of Good Friday is not in the Cross, it is in God’s joyful-creative-suffering love for our own world.  We are not alone, God is with us, God feels our pain and our joy, God inspires us to take our place as God’s companion in healing the world.