Sunday: Good Friday A
Reading: John 18:1-19:42
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

Not long after this sermon, we will take our turns venerating the cross, treating it with great respect and tenderness. We have a bigger than life-size Jesus hanging on the cross above the church. We parade around with a crucifix, Jesus' withered, musculatured body hanging off the cross. We cross ourselves. The cross of Christ is at the very center of our religion. You know it was basically a torture device, used to publicly humiliate and warn. It's the equivalent of a sawed off shotgun, or an electric chair, the cross is. We don't have gold necklaces made out of precision rifles to honor the great martyrs Martin Luther King or Gandhi. We don't have oil paintings to honor that that brave man who stood in front of that tank during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Even Philosophy majors don't plant Hemlock trees to honor the death of Socrates. What makes the untimely death of our moral exemplar, Jesus of Nazareth, any different from these others for whom we might nobly model our lives? What is with the cross? Jesus was more than merely a moral example. We call this Good Friday for a reason.

Now, Jesus was certainly a moral example. "In this world of violence and terror, to make your life a gift to God is supremely risky; Jesus accepts the risk and pays the price." How many of us would stay on the crusade for justice and equality, how many of us would continue to put our fingers in the eyes of the religious and political establishment, how many of us would march into Jerusalem if faced with a torturous death. Our convictions against poverty can be made stronger; we can be stauncher in our commitments about war and wealth. Jesus was staunch. If that is all that Jesus was, then Jesus deserves a tremendous amount of attention.

But Jesus was more than that. The cross of Jesus Christ reveals something incredibly important about God to us. This is it. Jesus, the very revelation of God, showed that there is no part of human experience that God does not know intimately. God is not some distant, vague deity either needing sacrifice to appease him or encouraging escapism from this world. God has been in the marrow of our lives. In John's passion, so beautifully sung for us just now, John has soldiers dress Jesus in purple, flog him, and put on him a crown of thorns. Pilate brought Jesus out in that state, to exhibit him. It brought that horrible picture from Abu Ghraib to my mind, you know the one with the Iraqi prisoner standing on a crate hooded, connected to electrical wires. It is tempting when one sees a picture like that to think, where is God? I'll tell you where. Right there. In the cross, Jesus said something about where God can be found. Right with us in our sorrows; standing against but amidst evil. The cross of Jesus makes space for God to be present as never before in this world."

In this way the cross of Christ is redemptive. In the cross, as Rowan Williams has said, Jesus "empties out his love and life into the heart of death and darkness, so that death will no longer be able to triumph, because death is not big enough or strong enough to hold God's life within it." Death is not the final word. Evil does not triumph. Boy do we need that. This year, 20 Chicago Public School children have been killed, 18 by gunfire. Yesterday, Maundy Thursday, 17 Iraqi civilians were killed. Evil is our world, evil is at our doorstep. You know that in 1909, the Hyde Park Improvement Club was founded as the first group in Chicago devoted to the separation of the races, initially pushing for segregated recreational facilities in nearby Washington Park. Are we that far from that? As Solzhenitsyn said, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Evil, death, they lurk close. But our God is not an antiseptic God seeking his distance from those things. You want to know where God is? God's in the emergency rooms of Chicago, the morgues of Baghdad, the places in our hearts that can't get over a hatred. God isn't just in this church, but out in Gage Park, in Abu Gharib prison, here in Hyde Park, still overcoming the virulent racism so public 100 years ago. But God is also in this church, because sorrow and death are in our midst. This morning a homeless ex-felon walked in for help, two dying fathers have been added to the prayer list this week, we all have sins that we are too deeply invested in hiding to articulate them in prayer. So, in a few minutes when we pray for those who suffer, the hungry, the homeless, the destitute, the oppressed, the sick, the wounded, and the crippled, the lonely, fearful and anguished, and on and on, that is our world. Creation groans. That is why the cross is so central. Jesus, who at Christmas we celebrate as the very incarnation of God, spent his life with prostitutes and sinners and has a shameful death. Strength is made perfect in weakness.

God is in the midst of us. Many of you know Brahms Requiem-the 2nd movement All Flesh is Grass. It begins quietly with strings; the low voices enter first, the movement subtly but surely moving towards intensity. As the entire chorus sings All Flesh is Grass, the timpani bangs away. The movement goes back and forth from quiet, woodwind music to the harshness of death. But it ends with these words from Isaiah, "The ransomed of the Lord shall return with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: sorrow and sighing shall flee away." Why is the cross so central to us? Because, the Triduum is not done. This one long service does not end when we sing "Were you there when they crucified the Lord?" We mourn this night the brutal death of Jesus on the cross, we mourn for the violence that pervades our world, we mourn for the evil that resides in our own heart. We mourn that death is so close. Yet we know that Easter is coming, that the Light of Christ is not finally extinguished. We try to live at arm's length from God's love. Jesus' outpouring of the divine love on the cross points out to us how difficult that is, because God is in the very stuff of life. God suffers alongside and redeems that suffering, for it is not the last word.

When you come to venerate the cross, pour out your sorrows, the evil with which you are acquainted, that which you want to hide from God. Jesus stood in front of the crowd, bleeding, wearing fake King clothing and being mocked. He was, in John, to carry his own cross. Even in John, the most in control of the Gospels, Jesus got thirsty. The Man of Sorrows is acquainted with grief. Thanks be to God.