Sermon for April 10, 2020 - Good Friday - Year A - The Rev'd Isaac P. Martinez

Good Friday Year A

Lections: Isa. 52:13-53:12; Ps. 22; John 18:1-19:42

I will be quite honest with you, my friends: I do not need to preach right now. In order to make meaning of this most familiar story of Jesus’s suffering and death this year, it would be enough for us to all sit in silence, to let the words of John’s Gospel echo in our ears, and to take in the sheer strangeness of our lives now in the midst of this pandemic.

In previous years, preachers on this holy day would exhort us to stay a while. “Do not be like Peter and abandon Jesus while he faces trial. Do not avert your gaze from the man on the cross, dying one of the most gruesome deaths humans ever invented. Remain at Golgotha. Do not rush to Easter.”

In previous years, that was a wise admonition. 21st century American culture is too adept at overlooking harsh realities, too quick to rationalize suffering, and too self-centered to consider any but the most superficial of sacrifices for the greater good. The secular world may think they like their weak imitation of Easter, but they know for a fact they want nothing to do with Good Friday.

As for the Church, and I’ll speak for myself here as a priest, in recent years, I was dutiful, and watched with Mother Mary and the faithful disciples. But I did so only with the words of Maundy Thursday on my lips: Love one another, as I have loved you, so you should love one another. And I watched knowing Easter was less than 24 hours away. Yes, in previous years, I could handle some of the pain, some of the grief, some of the meaningless suffering of Good Friday. But to stay with Jesus on the cross for even that little while required the routines of our Holy Week liturgies to brace me. And it required being with all of you, my fellow disciples, to sustain me.

As it has for all of us, this virus has snatched the reassurance of routine and the comfort of community out from under me. So this year, I don’t need to encourage you to linger at Calvary. I won’t ask you to keep looking at the cross. I don’t need to, because we are on it. Those who are sick from this virus and those who seek to heal them are on a cross. So are those who mourn the dead. Those who have lost jobs. Those struggling to balance working with raising kids home from school. Those confined to care homes and prisons. Those who have had months of planned celebrations snuffed out. Those facing this virus while also being homeless or living with an addiction or a mental illness. All of us who have lost a sense of normalcy, all of us who don’t know when this will end, all of us who fear or grieve or worry, all of us are now on a cross and are suffering.

In a cruel twist of irony though, we are not all suffering equally. The coronavirus itself may be no respecter of class or race or nationality. But it has emerged in a world that is defined by its differences and divisions. And humanity’s response so far has shamefully widened those divisions. Within our country, Black people are a third of those hospitalized from Covid-19, even as they only make up 13% of the population. This is a direct result of the systemic racism that pervades every aspect of America, including who has access to quality medical care, to jobs that pay a living wage, and to the ability and resources to work from home or take a sick day. This is on top of the fact that the poor and working class are bearing the brunt of the economic havoc we are experiencing.

Zooming out from just the United States however, only shows a grimmer picture. For all that we are failing our most marginalized residents, they at least have a better chance of survival than the tens of millions of refugees who are attempting to fight this virus while wealthy nations like ours clench our fists around the protective equipment, ventilators, and medical supplies that everyone needs. So for the first time in a long time, all of us are experiencing some part of the crucifixion. But some of us have been hanging on our crosses for a very, very long time.

Yes, beloved, the bleakness of this night is so real to us now. There is no need for symbolism to explain what Good Friday means this year. And there is no metaphor that can comfort us.

It is a good thing, then, that Jesus is not simply a symbol, that Jesus is no mere metaphor.

Because Jesus is with each of us on our crosses. Jesus always goes to the deepest depth of human suffering. He feels the sharpest pain. He bears the darkest despair. He faces the utter meaninglessness of death. He is right here with us, in all the ways this pandemic is hurting us. Perhaps one of the most terrible aspects of Covid-19 is how isolated the sick and dying are from family and loved ones. Thousands have died without feeling another human being touch them. In John’s Gospel, some of the disciples and his mother are near the cross. But they cannot touch Jesus to offer him a modicum of comfort or relief in his final minutes. Jesus knows what it is to die a very lonely death. He truly is our Good Shepherd, and he freely lays down his life to join us in all the ways we are dying.

But why does he have to die? I imagine that in the hours that follow Jesus’s death, his disciples and his own mother wrestle with that question, once the numbing shock has worn off. All four Gospels, in their own way, wrestle with that question of why Jesus died. All four come to the same conclusion: he died because God was willing to go that far to show us just how much our Creator loves us. Of course, they had the benefit of writing after the first Easter morning.

So, why do we suffer? Why have we been inflicted with this virus and all its attendant misery? I won’t dare to hazard a guess. And I suspect we will never have a completely satisfying answer to questions like that until the age to come. But knowing that Jesus the Christ shares my experience gives me hope that this virus is not the end. Knowing that Love Incarnate hung on a tree, alone and in pain, gives me hope that something good might come of out this very bad time. Not because it needed to happen, but because wherever God goes, even to the grave itself, the world will be transformed. Amen.