Sermon, Good Friday, April 19, 2019

The text for Good Friday is the Passion narrative. We heard 5 student storytellers perform John's version, John 18:1-19:42. 

image: Crucifixion by Graham Sutherland 

I once had a student who had been violently raped,

at knifepoint, as a child.

Her wounds were deep and big.

Because she was a child, 

     and because her attacker threatened to kill her if she told anyone,

she kept her silence and fed her wounds,

which became bigger and deeper over the years.

When she came to college,

she heard a professor tell this story we just heard.

She heard Jesus feeling abandoned, alone, abused, rejected,

broken, beaten, humiliated,

crying out from the cross to no one who would rescue him. 

She wept.

When she finally found words to put around those wounds,

she told me, “I never thought anyone could understand

what I was feeling, what I carry with me.

I never thought anyone could love me

if they knew how damaged I am.

But when I heard Jesus, crying out from the cross,

I knew—he knows.

He has been through it. He understands.”

In the agonizing cry of Jesus from the cross,

this woman heard her own voice,

her own cry, bursting out of her silent misery.

She found her voice, and she found herself—

because of Jesus.

In our church tradition, we hear the story of Christ’s passion

on both Palm Sunday and Good Friday,

twice in one week, because this story is too good to miss. 

It’s a bad story that is a good story.

It’s painful, it’s graphic,

it makes us think of the all the parts of life

we’d like to ignore or forget.

But we can’t miss it.

There are people in the world who are feeling

all the feels of this story:

abandoned, lonely, abused, rejected, broken down,

beaten up, humiliated.

Those things are isolating because

we don’t talk about them in polite company,

and it’s completely acceptable to lie when someone

 asks “how are you?”

This story lifts up for us that Jesus already knows how we are,

no matter how we try to hide it or make it pretty.

Jesus knows the emotional, physical, spiritual pain

we experience, no matter how awful, random,

or unique it feels to us.

Jesus knows what we know, deep and big and for sure.

People who are hurting need to know that Jesus knows.

We need to know that.

It’s all that, all the stuff of being human,

that Jesus takes to the cross with him,

so that it can be crucified with him, and redeemed with him.

The story of Christ’s passion isn’t just a story

to teach us a lesson,

or to make us feel bad about how awful humans can be.

This story not only tells us what God is up to in Christ—

this is God actually doing the promise of God,

that nothing can separate us from the love of God

in Christ Jesus.

That love is proven, that promise fulfilled—soon.

We must remember that this story, though powerful,

is not the point.

We have to go through it to get there,

but there’s a better ending, and a new beginning,

on the way.

Today we sit, exposed, wounds raw,

broken-hearted and just plain broken.

But we are surrounded by hope,

the sure and certain hope of resurrection.

It is a story we must hear and we must tell, for in it is life—

just what the world needs,

just what God is doing.

Amen.