Good Friday 2008

Homily for Good Friday 21 March 2008 Today, the most solemn day in the Church’s year, we come to place ourselves at the foot of the Cross and to contemplate our suffering Lord, our dying Jesus- “Jesus, our love, is crucified” as the old hymn says. We do well to focus our gaze on the crucified Jesus today, and to try and give some thought to the fact that the Cross, and the death of Jesus on the Cross, is so central to our faith. Some people, some theologians, have said that it is in fact only when we start to think about Jesus dying on the Cross that we can begin to understand what it means for us to be a Christian, to be a follower of Jesus, who said to us “Take up your cross, and follow me”. The Jesus who issues that invitation to us, is the God who became man for us. And as we look at the crucifix, we can see what that involved- what kind of man, what kind of human being he became- here he is: the outcast, the abandoned, the disgraced, the one with nothing, the one at the mercy of everyone, the one with no rights, the one with no say in what is done to him, the one who has only one motivation, the desire, that remains even to his dying breath, to love and serve, and identify with, “the least of my brethren”. The German theologian Juergen Moltmann says “God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be”. And that is just as well, isn’t it, because deep in our hearts each of us knows that we too are in fact the kind of human being we do not want to be, we do not even measure up to our own standards let alone reach God’s aspirations for us! But Jesus is with us, alongside us in all our failings, in all the mess we make of our lives- he is what another theologian has called “the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands”. But there is another aspect we must consider as we gaze upon the Cross today. For there dying for us is our God. And just as the crucifixion shows us what kind of man God became in the incarnation, it shows us too, what kind of God we have- this is what our God is like! St John tells us “God is Love”. And here we see Love in its perfection- for as St Paul tells us in that beautiful hymn to Love in his letter to the Corinthians, “Love does not insist on its own way….Love bears all things….Love endures all things”. Here is our God who is Love, a Love that is- as we ourselves know from our own love that we give to our partners and our families and friends- happy to be humble, content in self-surrender, at ease in helplessness, always waiting on the response of those whom He loves, untiring in caring for them, and unsparing in his devotion to them. The idea that we could worship such a God was a source of bewilderment to the pagans in the first centuries of the Church’s history, used only to gods who they thought by definition ought to have power, real power, and use and display their power on all occasions. But here, on the Cross, is our God, and here he displays his power, the power of Love, a love that can contain all our failings, all our sin, all our disloyalty and defection, that can take the wounds we inflict on him and on ourselves as we lash out in the delirium of our selfishness. God is the almighty, the omnipotent, the all-powerful, but as Moltmann says “omnipotence is never loved, it is only feared”- and our God wants our love, he thirsts for our love. And so, dear friends, as we join the throng that will surge forward at the end of our Liturgy to venerate the Cross, let us remind ourselves as we come to kiss those sacred wounds, “This is the kind of man God became, this is what our God is like”. Amen.