There is an irony about how on Good Friday
we read the longest Gospel lesson: John 18 and 19.
But we don’t have the time or opportunity
to go into an in-depth Bible study
on all the segments of these 2 chapters.
I think that this portion of the Gospels, the 4 Passion Accounts,
are the least read or studied, and even the least popular.
If we could see in John’s Gospel
how Jesus is the One who is empowered, who is acting,
our attitude might change,
and we might find ourselves dwelling more and more
on this portion of the Gospel,
reading it with love and devotion,
with joy and wonder and thanksgiving
for its powerful message
to encourage us
and fulfill our hopes
and give us deep gladness of heart.
In John’s Passion Account Jesus is the only one in control.
Everyone else exhibits
that they have no control over what is going on,
that there is great failure on their part
to achieve what they want to do.
As we know from the other Passion accounts,
the disciples have no apparent control over their drowsiness;
they fail to stay awake.
And then they all run away, fleeing for their lives.
Judas is doomed to play his role as betrayer
despite whatever his motivation and intentions were.
The band that comes to arrest Jesus at Gethsemane
are knocked to the ground by the force of the word
spoken by Jesus, his simple statement: “I AM.”
Only when Jesus purposely gives them a second chance
can they lay hands on him and take him away.
Peter, in spite of his earlier protestations,
fails in his ability to keep from denying his Lord.
The high priests and Sanhedrin
can’t make a credible case against Jesus.
And they have to revert to political pressure
to get Pilate to cooperate.
Pilate tries but fails to set Jesus free.
And Mary, his mother, must stand by
helplessly watching with the other women as he dies.
Everyone else is ineffective.
This is all a picture about us,
our failure,
our helplessness,
our misguided attempts to take matters into our own hands,
and how the results are not what we anticipated or wanted.
How often has this happened to you?
None of us is able to do what it takes save our own selves,
let alone the world.
But it is Jesus who acts, who is in control,
who accomplishes all that needed to be done,
right down to the last detail described in the ancient texts
about the Servant, the Lamb of God.
It is he who chooses when his last moment is, when he dies.
He completes all,
and breathes out his breath, and gives up his spirit.
Usually in each sermon there is an exhortation
- that which we are urged to do in response to the Word of God.
But on Good Friday, today, I give none.
Today we sit and do nothing, no action.
We can’t.
It is impossible.
Nor need we do anything…
…despite our question carried down through 2,000 years of history:
“What may we do that we may work the works of God?”
the question asked of Jesus in the 6th chapter of John.
The answer is believe, trust, have faith, surrender.
Surrender to Jesus.
Today it is Jesus alone who acts, who by dying accomplishes all.
It would be a denial of faith, of our basic trust in Jesus,
to seek to add our own action to what he has done for us.
Even the faith we do have in him is a gift that he has given to us,
breathing his breath/his Spirit into the disciples
and into us,
breathing out his last breath
to release that breath in us for life.
The last night I talked about one of the times I was in the Middle East,
a time when I was leading a pilgrimage in the Holy Land,
and when we were in Jerusalem
we walked the original Stations of the Cross,
the Way of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa.
It was not a nice spiritual exercise
there in the ancient city of Jerusalem,
in the heart of one of the most hotly contended
pieces of real estate.
Many would probably prefer the setting for such a Good Friday meditation
to be in chapels or cloistered walks
so as to enhance the meditation.
But this was on the busy streets of the old city of Jerusalem.
It was entirely lined with shops and businesses
and in some places too narrow for a motor vehicle to pass.
So as we walked along we got close up views of all the commerce
taking place beside us.
The last 5 stations are in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
a church overlaid with the clutter of centuries
and a definite eastern flavor of spirituality about it
that can seem quite foreign to our western minds.
And along the way some of the other 9 stations
have little chapels you can step into off the street.
But most of the time it's pushing your way through the crowds.
Carrying a large cross through the street
helped give coherence to the group.
It identified us as pilgrims engaged in a religious ritual.
But that was no protection.
The way of the Cross is full of evils and pitfalls and temptations.
In fact, we had not quite begun
when one of our group became victim to pickpockets.
There were hawkers pushing postcards in our faces.
There was a professional photographer flashing shots of us
so that he could come and sell us the photos later.
One of his pictures caught four of our pilgrims
following the cross, but all of them looking sideways
into a shop that seemed particularly enticing.
We had to be assertive about making a pathway through the street.
We had to shout over the surrounding noise.
In one place there was construction - jackhammers
and blowtorches showering sparks around us.
Poor lighting.
And always shops
which lured our attention away from what we were doing,
with their materialistic promises.
All antithetical to our task at hand.
So too Jesus had to face: the taunts, the indifference, the cruel looks
as he and his guards pushed their way through the same streets
2 millennia earlier.
Some people went along with their business of buying and selling
while the Lamb of God passed by.
How could they be oblivious to what was happening!
How could life go on as usual
while this execution was taking place!
They have eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear.
So, I guess there is no perfect way to carry out this ritual
of the Stations of the Cross.
It's always going to be less than perfect.
That's very much like making confession,
whether the sacrament of reconciliation
or the general confession in the Sunday morning liturgy,
it's always going to be less than perfect, less than complete.
Sometimes we come at the task of confession
as though we can get everything confessed,
so that we can be perfect, however momentary that is.
Instead we need to come to confession
so that we can acknowledge our dependence upon Jesus,
our dependence upon his forgiveness, his grace.
That's the key thing to get in making confession.
For the truth is, the reality we live in is this:
we are as guilty as sin.
But this death, which we have such a hard time paying attention to,
is for the healing of the world,
is for the healing of our sin-sickness.
We are not alone in having a hard time staying present to this death.
In the Garden of Gethsemane the disciples ran away.
Later, however, after the Resurrection and Pentecost
something very significant changed for them all,
and for the rest of their lives they were engaged full out in ministry.
How interesting - the disciples,
though they all ran away that night of the betrayal,
later they all stayed the course.
Tradition has it that each of them, except John,
died a martyr's death, and often in horrible torture.
John suffered exile and imprisonment on a desolate island,
a prolonged torture.
What made the difference for them,
that turned them from deserters to martyrs?
After Christ's death and resurrection,
they got it.
They got the message Jesus had been telling them all along.
One death does it all.
One death buys life for all.
One death brings healing and sanity and hope and new life,
and everything worth giving up your own life for.
I pray that each of us will be able to really get it
about this death, about this day.
It can be life changing
if you let it.
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