Good Friday: The New Family Conceived at the Foot of the Cross

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Good Friday

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean and Rector

In a week the Surgeon General has compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, with death tolls from the COVID-19 pandemic rising around the country, it’s not hard to hear and see echoes of the Passion Gospel according to John in the world around us. Things are grim. We walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Patients dying in isolation, separated from their loved ones who can only grieve and pray from afar. Doctors in some countries having to make impossible choices about whom to treat. Millions out of work, and the great uncertainty of ever knowing when this is all going to end. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

One of the clergy jokes about Palm Sunday is that the reason we read the Passion Gospel after the procession of the palms is because no one comes to Good Friday. It’s true that it’s sparsely attended, but I wonder whether if this year, Good Friday might just be the liturgy that speaks most powerfully to a world that’s been rendered nearly unrecognizable in the past few weeks. Good Friday might just be the unvarnished, stark, and scouring medicine we need when all the flimsy platitudes have dissolved, and hope is at a low ebb.

You see, the great gift of Good Friday is that God in Jesus Christ stands at the center of a world gone mad, a world on fire with violence, scapegoating, and hatred and takes it into Himself in order to free us, to heal us, to save us, to make a way for us. Contemplating Jesus on the Cross we can see all of our suffering pinned there--the suffering of the entire human family in the midst of this pandemic, the suffering of an exploited creation, the suffering of a world torn by hatred and violence, the suffering of a world divided by haves and have nots. God in the person of Jesus Christ takes upon Himself all the sufferings of the world. He plumbs the depths of human experience, including the terrible sense of abandonment by God that he endured on the cross. Jesus travels to that far country of estrangement, abandonment, and despair to fill it with the Father’s love. Contemplating Jesus on the Cross we glimpse the mystery of God’s presence with, for, and ahead of us even in the midst of terrible fear, loss, suffering, and death.

God in the person of Jesus Christ has united Himself to us in order to show us nothing can separate us from the love of God, that God’s love for us is tough and persistent, that even in the midst of the worst the world has to offer He is there drawing us to Himself. Gregory of Nazianzus writes that, “the unassumed is the unredeemed.” God in the person of Jesus Christ assumes upon Himself the full range of human experience in order that it might be shot through with love, soaked, saturated, with God’s presence. “Where can I go then from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” the psalmist asks. Good Friday answers that question with an emphatic “Nowhere!” God in Jesus pledges himself to us no matter the circumstances--in good times and in bad, in climbing up to heaven, or in making the grave our bed, God won’t let us go. He is with us. Even when the waters rise up to our necks He is ahead of us opening a door where we saw only an impenetrable wall.

I was remembering Bernard of Clairvaux, the great 12th century Benedictine saint who has a beautiful way of talking about the crucifixion as the sign of God’s solidarity with all of humanity. He writes, “It is perhaps we ourselves who are Christ’s Cross, to which he is fastened.” That’s an important dimension to the crucifixion to ponder. Jesus, out of his unconditional love for us, out of his desire to draw us into love, gives himself for us, fastens himself to us. He nails Himself to our suffering, our pain, our sorrow. That’s why Good Friday, for all its grisly, hellish horrors, is really a love story. It’s the story of the God who in the gift of His only Son will stop at nothing to set us free. There’s nowhere he won’t go to draw us home.

Does that change the fact of our suffering, hardship, and death? No. But it does change how we relate to those difficult realities. It means we are not alone in our sufferings. It means that God is present and active even when things seem their bleakest. It means that when we are at the end of our efforts, God is not at the end of God’s. It means we can hold it all a little more lightly, a little more lovingly. We remember who and whose we are and that the swift and varied changes of the world don’t have to define us or our response.

So that’s the first thing to remember about this day--that it’s first and foremost a pronouncement of God pro nobis, God for us. God’s deepest desire is to unite us to Godself. God’s deepest desire is for us to awaken from the sleep of self-centeredness and to find ourselves rooted and grounded in Christ, the one in whom true joys are to be found. God’s deepest desire is to love us into loving so that we might be a people for whom love, mercy, justice are our guideposts, our bread and butter. 

That’s why, if you look closely at the Good Friday liturgy it’s really a call to embody, enact, and participate in the high priestly ministry of Jesus. The Liturgy has us stand where Jesus stands in prayer and intercession for the whole world and then to go out as the embodiment of Jesus’ servanthood for others. God for us shifts to us for the world. In the servanthood of Jesus we find the true calling of every human being--to be for others without exception.

If you look at the Solemn Collects they are filled with an outpouring for love in prayer for whole world: for the nations of the world and the peoples of the earth, for all who suffer and are afflicted in body or in mind, for prisoners and captives, and those in mortal danger. Only once, when we pray for “the gift of a holy life,” do we ask for anything for ourselves. The liturgy patterns in us what the life of obedience and self-offering actually looks like--it shows us what it might mean to live with the grain of the universe, in love, rather than in enclosed in fear and self interest. Suddenly, Good Friday is not some maudlin, self-castigating affair, but  is of a piece with the humble Lordship we saw revealed on Palm Sunday. Suddenly, Good Friday is of a piece with the call to servanthood enacted in the foot-washing on Maundy Thursday. Suddenly, Holy Week’s true meaning--letting God in Christ through the Holy Spirit live Godself in and through the fragile lineaments of your precious life, becomes clear: “No longer I, but Christ in me who lives.”

When Jesus is hanging on the cross, he turns to his stricken, soul-pierced mother and, speaking about the Beloved Disciple says, “Woman, here is your son.” And he says to the Beloved Disciple, “Here is your mother.” This is the new family that is born at the foot of the cross. It’s a family without insider or outsider. It’s a family founded not on bloodline, or inheritance, but on self-offering love for all. Good Friday teaches us that we are to stand in solidarity with the whole human family, to recognize the fact of our implicatedness in the lives of others, and to serve them just as Jesus served us. 

If there is one thing the pandemic has taught us, it’s that people we thought of as “totally other,” or not a part of “our family,” are in fact our brothers and sisters. It turns out that we ignore our brotherhood and our sisterhood with those in Wuhan, with those in New York, with those in Italy, France, and Spain, with those in Germany and throughout the world, at our peril. We are diminished, rendered less human, by our lack of vision and compassion. The virus has shown us how interconnected we all are, how one tiny action like washing your hands, can have profound implications for the lives and wellbeing of others. The virus has shown us that we are indeed one flock for all the tribal divisions and human-erected barriers that threaten to separate us. 

Perhaps that’s another reason we call this day “good.” Not just in thanksgiving for what God has done for us in the person of his only Son. Not just because it shows us who we are really called to be, and what it means to live a truly human human life in service to others, but because it opens our eyes to the new family conceived at the foot of the cross, the family without boundary whose feet we wash, whose mouths we feed, whose wounds we anoint, whose thirst we slake, whose grieved and broken hearts we hold up to the Lord.