gd-friday-april-2-2010-mp3 (Click here for an audio version of this sermon.)

 

Today, the day we call Good Friday, we come face to face with Jesus’ willingness to suffer death on a cross. Today, we have to come to grips with a God who is willing to submit to the powers of this world, to the brutality of hardened criminals, to the violence of tyrants and dictators like King Herod, and to the senseless, mindless suffering we see on the streets of American cities and in the streets of Baghdad and Kabul.

 

But we need to consider the fact that, when Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked his Father to let the cup of suffering pass him by he wasn’t just cringing before the prospect of brute physical suffering. He was cringing before the prospect of a very particular kind of suffering that, for most people, is usually more feared than physical pain.

 

As brutal as it was, crucifixion was designed with more than one thing in mind. The other purpose of crucifixion was to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen.

 

As one writer puts it, “we have tended to downplay this aspect, both in our preaching and in our art. We have surrounded the cross with roses, with aesthetic and antiseptic wrapping towels. But that was not the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated.”

 

This was why the crucifixion was such a blow to Jesus’ disciples and why many of them abandoned him and scattered after the crucifixion. They just couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity and triumph.

 

Today, Good Friday, we have to ask the question, “What is the connection between this type of suffering and the glory of Easter Sunday? Why is it that the gospels says, “it is necessary to suffer in this way in order to enter into glory?”

 

 In August of 2008, a family I know experienced a horrendous tragedy.  The family, members, who live in Denver, were vacationing on the Oregon Coast with some of their Oregon relatives. One Sunday morning, as the parents of this family were walking on the beach with their oldest daughter, a small plane that had just taken off from a nearby airfield, developed engine trouble and crashed into the house they were renting. The couple from Denver’s two younger children and one of the children’s cousins were killed in the ensuing fireball.

 

It is difficult…almost impossible for any of us to understand what it must be like to go through a tragedy like this. Even though I have experienced my fair share of family tragedies in 30 years of ministry, it was very challenging for me to preach at the memorial service held for these children. I had lost touch with the family until recently when I received an email from the mother announcing that she and her husband were expecting a baby girl this month. In the email, she mentioned that her daughter, the older daughter who was not in the home when the plane hit, was having very mixed emotions about the arrival of a new sister. In my response, I said something that, subsequently, I worried might have been misunderstood. I said that her daughter would be “happier and stronger” for having gone through this tragedy.

 

What I was trying to say, of course, is what many of us have experienced in our own lives, but is difficult to rationally explain. The times in our lives when we have experienced a tragic accident, when we have witnessed the death of a loved one, when we have been on the receiving end of emotional abuse, or felt completely powerless, or gone through a humiliating incident that once happened to us, or made some mistake that left us publicly exposed – it is often these experiences that have created in us what could be called “a depth of soul.”

 

Looking back in these experiences, we realize that, as a result of them, we look at life very differently. We become more empathetic, more compassionate towards others. We become more tolerant and patient with family members and others who are hard to live with. In the dark and difficult times of our lives we know that we are not alone. We know that God is in the midst of our pain and suffering. Many of us, like Jesus, have, in one way or another, experienced the pain, and, perhaps, the shame and guilt that comes from losing people we love. Many of us have been, in one way or another, hung up publicly and humiliated. And because we have been through this we have developed a depth of soul.

 

This is what I wanted to say to the mother about her daughter. By “happier” I meant that she would have a “depth of soul.” She would have a more compassionate heart and deeper awareness of others, and that this would, in the long run, make her a happier person.

 

But, as many psychologists and theologians have noted, depth of soul comes in very different forms. Some experiences of humiliation and suffering are not always healthy.  For example, if we compare Judas and Peter in our Passion Gospel we see two different ways of dealing with failure, sorrow and suffering. Both of these men were heartbroken over Jesus’ crucifixion and what they had done to contribute to it, but they responded in very different ways. In Matthew’s Gospel, when Judas realizes what he has done in betraying Jesus, he tries to return the money he was paid by the chief priests and the elders. But when they refuse his offer, in despair, Judas went and committed suicide. There was nothing hopeful about the sorrow that Judas experienced. His humiliation did nothing to open his heart to the forgiveness and mercy of God. There was no depth of soul for Judas.  There was only despair – the kind of despair we see in many people who seek escape in addiction or other self-destructive lifestyles… or, respond to their humiliation by living lives of violent crime and murder.

 

In contrast, Peter let his remorse and grief lead him to a new level of faith and trust in life and in God. Peter’s humiliation led him to experience a depth of soul. His pain led him to realize that God was working graciously and redemptively within this tragedy.

 

In the crucifixion, Jesus was humiliated, shamed, brutalized. But that pain stretched his heart to a great depth. And that new space did not fill in with bitterness, anger, rage, or self-destruction. It filled, instead, with a depth of empathy and forgiveness that we are still struggling to understand today.

 

The former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, says, “In the mystery of suffering, we have arrived at the heart of faith.” You notice, he said “at the heart,” not at the understanding. Good Friday is a day for us to stare in wonder and amazement at this great mystery – how such suffering and humiliation can stretch our hearts and fill them with compassion. Good Friday is a day to experience, not necessarily to understand, the strange, absurd, even crazy way that God has revealed his love for us. May our hearts be stretched and our souls deepened by this day. Amen.