Good Friday Sermon

This time of year, we wake every morning to the sound of the robins singing. Every spring, for untold thousands of years, they’ve sung the same song – the same few notes, over and over. What does it mean? I hardly know. But they must sing. They would not be robins were they not singing their song.

And so it is with us. Every spring, for two thousand years, we’ve sung our same song. We’ve rehearsed this same story – the passion of Christ. And even though it is very much our human story, it sometimes feels as mysterious to me as the robins’ song.

In fact, the more I age, the more questions I have about the specific meaning of anything, including the cross. And yet, also as I age, the more settled I become that the base reality – of everything – is God and the absolute goodness and trustworthiness of God.

And with that, I cannot escape the cross and my conviction that the cross of Christ is the centerpiece of wisdom for us in understanding this human experience we are having, an experience in which God, in Christ, is also participant.

In every version of the story, Jesus’ determined destination is the same. In obedience to God, he sets his face to Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed. He chooses Golgotha and the tomb. And in so doing, God in Christ joins us in the bowels of our human experience, not only in suffering (but certainly that), but also as victim of human wickedness – of betrayal, violence, torture, mockery.

Such that every experience of human wickedness now becomes, for me, the place of Christ’s abode – of Golgotha revisited – again and again. Christ dying in the streets of Mariupol. Christ drowning in a sinking Russian battleship.

But what does it mean, this robin’s song we keep singing?

Writing about the Eucharist, the poet Mary Oliver once said:

“Centuries ago, theologians claimed they had parsed with precision how God acted on the bread and wine during the celebration of the Eucharist.

“This wasn’t helpful.

“Their lust for certitude bruised a mystery which was best left alone. It eventually birthed theological wars about the nature of a meal that was ironically intended to mend, not tear apart.

“I don’t need to know what happens to the bread and wine to experience the oceanic love of God that I feel when I receive it, anymore than a newborn needs to know the mother’s name and address to see and feel the adoration in her gaze.”

The same can be said of the cross. Too many centuries of theologians’ parsings have often become unhelpful. In attempting to reveal, they’ve become vandals of a mystery best bowed before in humility.

After all, as someone once observed, “Jesus did not give us what we really ask: a rational explanation of the existence of suffering…. He said that the Son of Man had to suffer; he did not say why.”

But as I said earlier, beneath (or perhaps within) all suffering, all unanswered questions, there remains one thing. And that is God – trustworthy and good.

I read a story this week of a mother whose child was being prepared for surgery. “We have to decide right now,” she told her husband, “whether or not God is good, because if we wait to determine that by the results of this surgery, we will always keep God on trial.”

For every beautiful thing in this world, there is a corresponding ugliness. For every gracious act, there is a cruel act. And if our trust in God is based only on an assurance of perpetual blessings and good things, God is forever on trial, at arm’s length, and suspect.

But if (especially on this day) we can behold Christ crucified, and yet believe God is with him, God is in him, that God has neither abandoned nor scorned him, then there is no place where God is not. Which means there is no place where love is not. And if this be so, then all shall be well.

In the tradition of Christian art, we’ve inherited the image of the Pieta – that moment when Mary, the Mother of God, receives her son’s now lifeless body from the cross. The blood now spilt, the breath now gone, all that is left is love – the adoring gaze of a mother on her son. It is a love that needs no explanation. It simply is. Fitting. True. Complete.

And as it is with the mother we can see, so it is with the God we cannot see. And more so.

In all things, and everything, even the darkest hour, God is. So all is sanctified and we can breathe.

Until even that day when God designs, “Your breath, too must now cease. But even there, I am love. And I remain with you.”