Good Friday - Friday, April 19, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Rev. Matthew Wright, CRC
Good Friday - Friday, April 19, 2019

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

“It is finished.”  These are Jesus’ final words in John’s account of the Passion that we’ve just heard.  In Latin, this is Consummatum est—It is consummated.  Today, Good Friday, is the consummation of the marriage of heaven and earth; the consummation of the union Jesus has been living into, and out of, throughout his ministry.  Today, Jesus’ laboring on the Cross is his final great act of lovemaking with the world.

And we, the Church, have created some truly horrible theologies around this final act—that it was payment to a wrathful god; that Jesus took the beating we deserve.  John Dominic Crossan says that most of our so-called “atonement theology” amounts to little more than “cosmic child-abuse.”  But we only stray down those dead-end roads when fail to miss the note of cosmic love in which Jesus’ whole life is sung and offered; when we fail to recognize the God of Love he reveals in his living, and today, in the consummation of his life, in his dying.

In this final great act of lovemaking, in Jesus’ dying, he quickens a new kind of human life, a new possibility.  Bred into all of us, as our evolutionary baggage, is a survival-of-the-fittest instinct or tendency; we all come into the world with deeply programmed fight-or-flight responses.  And this programming, helpful as it has been in our evolutionary history, leads us to all manner of division, separation, and tribalism within the human family today.  It’s our essential tendency to “other”—to make of someone else an object of competition; an enemy.  It’s a way of seeing the world governed by our primitive hindbrain—what scientists often call our “reptilian” or “lizard brain.”

And while we can thank this “lizard brain” for bringing us this far in humanity’s unfolding, we nevertheless see in Jesus an effort at every turn to overcome this kneejerk tendency to “other” and to replace it instead with a different possibility: upholding the Samaritan (heretic) as a model of godliness; finding great faith in a (pagan) Roman centurion; looking and loving outside of the lines and beyond the boundaries; pushing his disciples to see not from fear and separation, but from our essential unity.

Last night, Maundy Thursday—knowing that he’s about to die—Jesus prayed to the Father, “May they all be one, as you and I are one.”  May they all make this leap beyond fear and division.  And he then bears that seeing from oneness all the way down to his dying breath.  Perhaps this is what we really mean when we speak of “the Atonement”—which, of course, etymologically simply means “at-one-ment”: making one.

Can love, can seeing from oneness, be held even into our moments of greatest fear, greatest contraction—held down into the world’s deepest darkness and suffering?  Can all of it be included in love?  Or will even Jesus retreat at the last (as we most likely would) into his primitive fear-centers and curse those who would kill him?  We could understand it if he did.  We would probably even forgive it.  In fact, we might be comforted by it.  But then the new possibility, the new life he brings, would not have been consummated—would not have been quickened in the heart of the world.

Jesus’ path all along has been a path of self-emptying, outpoured love; of what St. Paul calls kenosis.  Can Jesus hold true to that path, even today, betrayed, suffering, and crucified?  Luke tells us that among his dying words were these, spoken for his murderers: “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  Every act of fear, hate, betrayal, of selfishness, of othering, Jesus sees is simply an act of ignorance—because when we truly know… as Jesus did—when we truly know that we’re not separate, all that’s left is love.

Jesus holds true to the path; he does not judge or blame or other.  He holds the seeing; he stays rooted and grounded and dies in love.  This is Atonement, at-one-ment.  I don’t think anyone has ever better understood or expressed the meaning of this reality than Julian of Norwich, that great 14th century mystic, who following her visions of the Crucified Christ wrote:

“Here saw I a great one-ing between Christ and us, to mine understanding: for when He was in pain, we were in pain.  And all creatures that might suffer pain, suffered with Him.  The love of God creates in us such a oneing that when it is truly seen, no person can separate themselves from another.  In the sight of God, we are all oned, and one person is all people and all people are one person.”

Jesus looks with these eyes, with this seeing, as he dies.  It is consummated; his lovemaking is complete.  He dies and the seed of his life falls into the ground.  “Very truly, I tell you, unless a seed, a grain of wheat, falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).

Today, with this Consummatum est, the seed of heaven falls into the womb of the earth, and something new is conceived.  A new kind of life.  A new kind of human being.  A human being who refuses to give in to fear or hatred or othering.  In fully consummating this possibility, Jesus opens it for all of us.

That great Christian mystic of recent years, Beatrice Bruteau, wrote that “Christ is the ‘first mutant,’ who passes his ‘genes’ or form of life to those who come after him.”  Kenosis lived to the hilt, self-emptying in unjudging love, seeing from unity down to one’s dying breath, is now planted as a fully consummated, fully realized possibility within the DNA of the human family.

Some of you may know the writings of Caryll Houselander, a Roman Catholic mystic, author, poet who died in the 1950s.  She captures the mystery beautifully:

“[When Christ died] the whole world was sown with the seed of Christ’s life; that which happened thirty years ago in the womb of the Virgin Mother was happening now, but now it was happening yet more secretly, yet more mysteriously, in the womb of the whole world.  Christ had already told those who flocked to hear Him preach that the seed must fall into the earth, or else remain by itself alone.  Now the seed of His life was hidden in darkness in order that His life should quicken in countless hearts, over and over again for all time.  His [death], which seemed to be the end, was the beginning.  It was the beginning of Christ-life in multitudes of souls.”

This is what is happening in the darkness of Good Friday.  Look past the fear and the hatred and the ignorance charging through and around the events of this day.  They’re all a distraction from what’s really going on.  Jesus isn’t paying-off an angry god, or offering himself in order to make you feel bad about yourself.  Rather, in the words of Cynthia Bourgeault,

“Jesus’ real purpose in this sacrifice was to wager his own life against his core conviction that love is stronger than death, and that the laying down of self which is the essence of this love leads not to death, but to life. . . . [The Paschal Mystery reminds] us that it is not only possible but imperative to fall through fear into love because that is the only way we will ever truly know what it means to be alive.”

Consummatum est.  Today, Good Friday, it is consummated.  On the Cross Jesus draws all the world to himself in one great and final act of lovemaking.  A new pattern is completed and a new humanity conceived.  And so, may the mutation continue!  May this love, sown today in the womb of the world, be quickened in all our hearts.

The last words I give to Lady Julian:

“Would you know your Lord’s meaning in this thing?  Know it well, love was his meaning.  Who showed it to you?  Love.  What did he show you?  Love.  Why did he show it?  For love.  Hold fast to this and you will know and understand more of the same; but you will never understand or know from it anything else, for all eternity.”

Amen.