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GOOD FRIDAY, Year A: March 21 2008

The Arrest

'Friend, why are you here?'

The question startles us, disconcerts us: not only by its directness, but also because of the context — the place and the circumstances — in which it is asked.

This is Gethsemane (Matthew's account). Jesus is the speaker, and the person He is addressing is Judas Iscariot.

And it is the question which confronts us at the beginning of the Passion. Why are you here? What have you come for? What are you expecting?

And in Jesus' response to what the hour has brought upon Him, and in the way in which He goes forward to meet it, we see something of the meaning of faith.

Many people — perhaps including ourselves — have a fantasy about faith. They think that having faith means knowing all the answers to the problems and difficulties of life; that having faith means being protected and safeguarded from the perplexities and heartbreak of our human condition. 'I wish I had your faith'.

Now there seems to be in all of us an instinctive groping after making sense of our existence and of our world. We long to be able to understand its contradictions and confusions, to see it redeemed of its evils and made whole. We want to make sense of it. We look for some kind of assurance that our small destinies are in GOD's hands, and that the world and its tumultuous events are somehow held within his purposes, and that those purposes are purposes of love, and are for our good.

So we look for clues which will confirm our hopes, only to find that the trail peters out. We pick up threads which look promising, only to find that they lead nowhere. We try to make fresh beginnings in our understanding of GOD, only to find that they are false starts. We grope for a sense of meaning in our lives, we try to discern some sense of purpose running through the story, but we can never be certain that we are on the right track, or that we are not fooling ourselves.

But that is precisely what the life of faith is all about. Faith is not certainty; it is not a matter of knowing all the answers. Faith is much humbler, much more tentative, much more vulnerable, than that.

And in what are we to have faith? A political programme? A party manifesto? A theological system? An ecclesiastical structure? But GOD does not seem to have given us anything like that. He has not given us something; rather he has given us SomeOne — not a thing but a Person; and it is to that Person that we are to give the assent of faith: our trust.

But Jesus does not cow or compel our response. He does not overwhelm us by dazzling proofs or cogent arguments. Whatever it is He wants from us, He wants us to give it freely. So He waits for our response; He will not force it out of us against our will.

And that is why He is content to keep to the shadows and half-lights. That is why He evades all our attempts to get Him into a clear focus, or to pin Him down. He does not answer our questions: He does not tell us who He is, or what He is doing. He remains silent. But in fact it is as we listen to that silence, and try to receive it into our hearts, that faith comes to its full realisation in us — in the simple response, the single word ''Yes''. ''Yes'' — ''Yes'' to GOD: that is the word of faith. There is much that I do not know. There is much that I do not understand. There is much that puzzles and confuses and hurts — but ''Yes'' — ''Yes'' to the GOD who in Christ has said ''Yes'' to us.

For in Christ GOD has turned towards us decisively and unconditionally. In Christ GOD has acknowledged us, affirmed us, and come to us; He has shown that He wants to be with us: not over us, but with us, 'bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh', sharing our existence, our condition, made one with us, that we might come to the fullness of life which He intends for us.

That fullness of life is the meaning of GOD's ''Yes'' to us given in the life and destiny of Jesus of Nazareth. And faith is our response, our ''Yes'' to that — and it turns out to be not at all what we had expected. For GOD's ''Yes'' to us 'made flesh' — not in a national hero; not a political leader; not a philosopher; but in an obscure Galilean Carpenter — radically calls into question all that we assume to be the meaning and purpose of our human existence.

We instinctively assume that what matters more than anything else is that we should survive — survive at all costs — and consciously or unconsciously we bend all our energies towards that. And not just physical survival — all our strategies and techniques for getting our own way, all our tricks and tactics for self-promotion and self-advancement and self-fulfilment, are all fuelled and energised by our drive for survival.

But Jesus of Nazareth shows us something else. He shows us in His life and in His death that the meaning of existence is not the struggle to survive at all costs, but sacrifice. That is how life comes to its fullness — not in living for oneself and for one's own interests, but in sacrifice; not by hanging on, but by letting go — laying aside the choices and preferences which one's own will makes and clings to, no matter how costly that may be.

Sacrifice, not survival. That is the deepest law of life, for it rises out of the heart of GOD Himself, and is focused for us on the screen of history in the life and death of the obscure Carpenter of Nazareth, who 'having loved His own who were in the world, loved them to the end' — 'to the end', for that is love's will, that is love's way.

To say ''Yes'' to that is to surrender ourselves, to yield ourselves, to His kind of loving, His way of loving. Faith is our baptism into His sacrifice, His death and resurrection. That is what He invites us to when He calls us His 'friends'; 'servants' no longer 'but friends [...] for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you'.

And such faith is not achieved once and for all in a single moment. The ''Yes'' of faith must be renewed each day, probably in ever more costly and demanding ways. For love, real love, sacrificial love — love that seeks nothing for itself — is without limit, without safeguard, without condition.

Jesus said, 'whoever would save his life will lose it': the struggle to survive at all costs is self-defeating. But 'whoever loses his life for my sake, and the gospels, will save it'. That was the message of His life, fulfilled in the manner of His dying.

''Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well. Love was all his meaning.''

And He invites us to make with Him the venture of faith; invites us to say ''Yes'' to the pattern of His life and death and make it our own; invites us to see all our uncertainties and bafflement and pain as the signs of His Passion in us. We in Him. He in us.

For in our experience of all the hurts and confusions and perplexities of life, the Christian differs from the unbeliever, not in having any reason to expect a miraculous intervention of celestial power which will take 'this cup' from us; but in the faith that, whether it passes from us or not, GOD Himself is with us, keeping company with us, sharing it with us, to the last bitter drop.

It is the response to circumstances and to what life brings us to be which is decisive. Jesus reveals the true response. He does not call for revenge. He does not rail against GOD or lay accusations against him. He does not give way to self-pity or despair. He says ''yes''. He trusts, and He loves. He goes through the fire, and He prevails.

The Crucifixion — (i)

The cross-beam is lifted from the Carpenter's shoulders, and He stands waiting for what is to be done with Him. They offer Him 'wine mingled with myrrh', but He refuses it, preferring rather to feel the fullness of His pain with unclouded senses. Around Him are the soldiers, bustling about as they prepare for the job in hand. Then there are the priests, and busy mockers, and an assortment of idle sightseers and casual loungers, drawn by the prospect of a spectacle gruesome and entertaining. And further off a few women — among them His Mother.

They lay hands on Him and strip Him naked before everyone; naked as He created Himself; naked as He created us. Naked as the Man and Woman in the Garden when they sought to cover their shame. Naked as Abel slain, as Noah drunken; naked as David in his adultery. He carries the guilt and shame of it all — only His is the guilt without the pleasure, the shame without the guilt. 'Behold the Man', and see how in Him all the falsehoods, all the murders, all the adulteries, all the shameful pleasures, all the degradations and exploitations of Adam's seed are exposed. This is Everyman — abused, abandoned, humiliated, waiting for death.

He is stripped of His garments and stands there on display for all to see. He has nothing now which he can call His own. He has relinquished everything, surrendered everything, let go of everything: he clings to nothing. And this, remember, is the one who not so long ago told us not to fret over the body, how to keep it fed and clothed: that GOD who clothes the grasses of the field will do as much — and more — for us. See now the result of His childlike, improvident, trust. This is the man who told us that if anyone would take our coat from us we should let him have our shirt as well. See how the world has taken Him at His word, and He must go this last tortured mile of His life dispossessed and stripped, utterly defenceless and powerless in the hands of others.

The Gospel writers tell us that Jesus was not the only one to be executed that Friday morning: 'two others were led out to be executed with Him [...] two others [...] criminals'.

Such were His companions in death. But that is entirely consistent with the company He had so frequently chosen in life. He had made a point of seeking out men and women of dubious character and doubtful reputation, preferring to be known as the 'friend of publicans and sinners' rather than being with those 'who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others'.

He is to die — not only as a criminal; He is also to die a slave's death. Crucifixion was the punishment reserved under Roman law for slaves and other low-class criminals. But that was all He had ever claimed to be: He had said that He was in the world 'as one who serves' — a point which He underlined at the Last Supper when He had 'laid aside His garments and girded Himself with a towel' and had taken 'the lowest place'. Kneeling before each of His disciples, He had washed their feet. It was the most menial task, and He did it.

That one act focussed into a single point the meaning and significance of His life and identity — that 'although He was in the form of GOD He did not cling to equality with GOD, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave'. At one stroke GOD, as it were dispossessed and disinherited Himself, divested Himself of 'all rule and authority and power', and came to us to live in our world, not just as one of us, but as a slave, content to be 'last of all and servant of all'.

He came as a slave. And a slave, remember, has no rights, can make no claims. A slave possesses nothing, not even himself. He belongs to another, is someone else's possession: part of the household furniture; an item in a list; a nameless cog in the machine; a thing.

So Jesus goes to His death — a criminal's death, a slave's death — naked and stripped of everything: a stark reminder of all that He said about divesting ourselves of self-regarding preoccupations and self-serving ambitions.

From the beginning He had sought only one thing — to be 'about the Father's business'. 'I do not seek my own glory,' He said, 'If I glorify myself my glory is nothing'.

Unlike the Pharisees who practised their piety publicly in order to be seen and admired by others, for they 'loved the praise of men more than the praise of GOD', Jesus is content to go through the world with only one ambition, which was 'to do the will of Him who had sent Him, and to finish His work'. That was all He wanted; He asked for nothing more.

And doing what the Father wanted was, He said, His 'food'. It was that commitment which fed Him, which nourished and sustained Him. It was that availability to the Father which (like food) gave Him His substance, the stuff and fibre of His being, His energy, His identity. Nothing else mattered.

And it was the Father's will that Jesus, the Beloved Son, should be 'the bread of life', given 'for the life of the world'. And bread is humble and generous; bread is for breaking and sharing if it is to feed and sustain us. And that is who Jesus is and what he does.

But we need the eyes of faith to see that that is so. For Jesus will not promote Himself or His course. At the very beginning of His Public Ministry He rejects decisively the temptation to make an impression by spectacular displays of supernatural power; He will not manipulate or compel or dazzle dull hearts into belief. He wants our response to Him and His claims to be freely given.

And that is how it is — to the end — and at the end. He submits to men's calumnies and false accusations, and dies a shameful and ignominious death, a criminal's death, a slave's death, misunderstood and misrepresented. He leaves His friends bewildered, confused, and heart-broken. And as for the world, He leaves the world to make up its own mind about Him — to dismiss Him as a criminal or a fool; a self-deluded imposter or a megalomaniac; an irrelevance — just whichever the world chooses. 'He will not cry or lift up His voice, or make it heard in the street'.

Here in 'the place which is called the Skull', the place of utter dereliction and defeat; here in the rawness of the naked lacerated flesh, stripped and whipped and under thorns, and nailed and battened to two planks of wood, faith discerns infinite love offered to us; infinite love infinitely available. Only faith dare hope that it may be so — and we have nothing else, only faith: reason, logic, argument, cannot help us.

And the 'inscription over Him [...] written in Hebrew, and in Latin, and in Greek [...] Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews'. Who could have eyes to see that Pilate's cynical mocking attempt to pay off a few political scores against the Jews was in fact a living oracle? Who could perceive that the gallows was a throne? Who could hear that terrible cry of a breaking heart, 'Why hast thou forsaken me?' And yet believe?

There was one who could and did — one who was there with Him and saw it all, one who was crucified with Him, and who prayed, 'Remember me when You come in Your Kingly power'. And he, you remember, was a criminal, one of the two crucified with Him.

And then right at the end, when 'all was now finished', there was another, another who bore witness, one who stood there, 'keeping watch over Jesus' — one for whom at the beginning this was all simply part of the drill; routine stuff; all in a day's work; familiar, commonplace, boring.

But he too saw beyond all that — saw that this was altogether something else, and said, 'Truly, this was GOD's Son'. And he, you remember, was the centurion, a worshipper (if at all) of other gods, an outsider, one who didn't belong.

These two, the criminal and the soldier, saw and believed, although — we may reasonably assume — they knew not the Scriptures. They saw beyond the degradation, the hideousness, the utter defeat, of this one man's dying.

So may it be granted to us in all that befalls us, and in all the worst that may come upon us, that like them we may witness to Him who is both our Lord and our GOD, and whose will it is to be for all the world 'the bread of life'.

The Crucifixion — (ii)

'So they took Jesus, and He went out, bearing His own cross, to the place called the place of a skull [...] There they crucified Him.'

It's all very matter-of-fact and down-beat, the telling of it; there's no drama about it, nothing hyped-up or over-the-top in the Evangelist's account: he states the facts baldly and unemotionally. He tells it as it is. It all seems unremarkable and common-place. And indeed on the face of it there was nothing particularly unusual in what was done on that spring afternoon all those centuries ago. Thousands of people in the ancient world were executed in this way. This was the punishment used by Romans for criminals, for those who offended against the state and against society. It was an horrendous and hideous and agonising way to die; and it was degrading and humiliating to the maximum degree.

Crucifixion was common-place, an everyday occurrence, a familiar sight throughout the Roman Empire. But there is something about this death which is different from the others. There is something in this particular spectacle of a man bound and nailed to two planks of wood, and hoisted between earth and sky, as though disowned and outlawed by both, which down the centuries has touched and troubled the hearts and minds of millions of people in every part of the world. There is something here which disturbs and questions us; something to which we cannot be indifferent; something which seems to speak to us; something which makes a claim upon us. We can't help feeling, whether we like it or not, that this death has something to do with us.

The body is stripped and exposed; it is a pauper's death, undignified, shameful, indecent. The hands and feet are fixed and nailed; there is tension here, strain and helplessness and frustration. The head is bound about with thorns. It's a cruel joke — a reminder to us that the deepest anguish includes as well as physical agony darkness of mind and desolation of spirit. The arms are stretched out in a gesture which is at once one of welcome, intercession, and total surrender. The lips are parched; the heart is pierced. We do not know what to make of this death. We cannot be sure whether it is a triumph or a failure; victory or defeat. Somehow it seems to be both.

It is also part of the disturbing effect of this spectacle that although this is another man's death we can't help feeling that it is our own as well, for everything we see here is familiar to us.

His loneliness, His isolation. Yes, we know about that. We know what it is to be excluded, edged out, overlooked, ignored, written off, discriminated against. Our secret and furtive obsessions and fantasies identify us with His shame and degradation. Like Him on His Cross, we know what it is to be helpless and powerless; imprisoned by circumstances over which we have no control. We know what it is to be nailed down by the iron necessities of our existence, frustrated and limited by the way things are for us. We too thirst — thirst for what will renew our parched and shrivelled lives and make us whole and fruitful. Our hearts have been broken many times by the silence of GOD, our spirits bruised and darkened by His absence. It is ourselves we see upon the crucifix.

The Crucified is no stranger; His Cross is not unfamiliar to us; the Passion He endures is ours as well. For we human beings are endlessly crucified upon the irreconcilable opposites of life; troubled, tormented and broken by the contradictions, paradoxes and dilemmas of our human existence. We experience life — reality — as divided and fragmented: hope and despair, confidence and fear, assurance and doubt. Is reality for us, on our side? Or is it against us? Is it ''Yes'' or is it ''No''? Or is it simply and cruelly indifferent?

We human beings want to believe that reality is for us, that it is on our side. We hope that it might be so. But again and again things don't work out like that: our hopes are cruelly dashed; our expectations are disappointed; and we feel let down — even betrayed somehow, cheated and mocked, and we can only conclude that ultimately there is no real purpose or ultimate meaning to our existence, and that everything in the end is random, and indifferent to us and to our struggles to make sense of what we experience and endure, and that there is no point to anything.

And that is the Cross — our Cross: our endless Golgotha; the endless Golgotha of the whole human race.

But what Good Friday scandalously asserts is that He who died that day at 'the place called the place of a skull' was not just another victim of the world's huge torment, but was in some particular and unique way GOD Himself. If Jesus is GOD's way of being human, then what we see here is GOD suffering as we suffer; GOD suffering in our flesh: reality on our side — reality with us and for us.

In other words, GOD was not content with sending representatives or ambassadors to deliver His messages; but rather, without privilege and without safeguard, Himself submitted to and endured the perplexities, the despairs, the agonies of our human existence.

GOD does not disown the world's anguish and brokenness; He does not stand aside from it; He is not aloof from it. But He does not come with intellectual answers to our questions; He does not come with a philosophical system or a political programme. He comes quite simply as one of us, one of Adam's seed, 'bone of our bones, flesh of our flesh', one of us, one with us in flesh and blood, in sweat and spittle, and accepts betrayal, rejection, condemnation, accepts the burden of what it is to be human, and bears it 'to the end' — 'to the end', for that is Love's will, that is Love's way.

Jesus Christ shares not only in the fullness of human life; He shares in its emptiness as well. He takes into himself all our poverty, all our frailty; He embraces, enfolds and holds all our wretchedness and helplessness.

And, in taking it all, He heals and transforms it all — betrayal, rejection, unjust condemnation; the dismantling of His life; the undoing of His identity; the dissolution of His faith, of everything that He had believed in and trusted in. He accepts it all, so that when we too come to 'the place of the skull', the places of dereliction and torment in our own lives, we may find that He is there too, there already, waiting to be with us: 'though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death [...] you are with me'. 'If I make the grave my bed, you are there also.'

He submitted to being misunderstood, misjudged; to being written off and forsaken. Therefore whatever loneliness we endure now contains GOD's presence. He accepted the desolation, of separation from GOD, the loss of GOD.

Therefore GOD is with us even when we have no sense, no awareness, of His presence. He accepted failure so that we might find promise in defeat, and gain in loss. He accepted death, so that death is no longer a descent into emptiness and extinction; for now even death is filled with GOD, and the grave has become the place where we are born again.

He accepted everything that He might show us that everything that is accepted out of love and for love's sake is redeemed, and that the places of impossibility in our life are found to be the places where the Lord is with us and keeps company with us and He provides all that is necessary — Himself and His grace — to see us through.

'Jesus embraces this supremely dark act, the murder of GOD's own Son, and makes it fruitful. So there is nothing in human history that cannot somehow in ways that we cannot anticipate be embraced and bear its fruit [...] transformed into a moment of grace [...] of gift} — Timothy Radcliffe.

'The light is at the heart of the dark; the dawn breaks when we have entered fully into the night' — Rowan Williams.