Sermon for April 19, 2019 - Good Friday - The Rev'd Elise A. Feyerherm
John 18:1-19:42
Growing up, I was not in the habit of making the sign of the cross during worship. Our church was Lutheran, and although our worship was formal and liturgical, crossing ourselves was simply not the practice. It was not actively condemned or discouraged; I just never saw anyone do it. Perhaps our omission was, somewhere in the distant past, connected with wanting to avoid anything too Roman Catholic. Perhaps it had to do with Martin Luther’s emphasis on inner faith rather than outward works. My parents came from solid Midwestern Lutheran stock – none of these extra flourishes in our family piety. Whatever the reason, we just never did it.
At a certain point in my life, when I was in my late twenties, I think, the hankering began to grow – I wanted to see what it would be like for my fingers to trace the sign of the cross on my body. I was still attending a Lutheran church, so there wasn’t much in the way of an example for me to follow. But I began crossing myself after the confession, when the pastor was declaring Christ’s forgiveness. I liked the feeling of making a physical response to this declaration of grace and love; it felt like I was taking forgiveness into my body, into the deepest part of my self. I was saying and enacting my “yes” to God.
Over the past thirty years, as I entered the Episcopal Church and experienced a much broader swath of theology, worship, and personal practice, my crosses became more numerous. At the beginning of the liturgy: Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As the priest pronounced absolution: May Almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen you in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, bring you to eternal life. During the Eucharistic prayer, when the Holy Spirit was called upon to sanctify us and prepare us to receive Christ’s Body and Blood. And when the gospel was announced, I learned, by watching those around me, to use my thumb to make small crosses on my forehead, my lips, and my chest, performing bodily what I prayed for spiritually: that the Good News would implant itself in my mind, my speech, and my heart.
These crosses long preceded my ordination, and you will still see me make them. I have added some crosses since I was ordained a priest: The cross my hand sketches over the bread and wine, asking that they may become for us the Body and Blood; the crosses I make with my thumb on the foreheads of those who come to receive a blessing; the crosses I trace with holy oil on the heads of those who need healing or are approaching death; and the cross I make over the congregation at the final blessing.
Remember, though, many of my crosses are not the actions of a priest. They are the actions of a baptized Christian, a member of the Body of Christ.
On this day especially, we contemplate crosses – we contemplate one cross in particular, that one being the cross on which Jesus died. We should not let the elegance of the liturgy or the beauty of this day’s prayers deceive us into thinking that this cross was a light thing for Jesus to accept, because it wasn’t. The making of the sign of the cross on our own bodies is nothing, nothing, compared to what happened on Golgotha. And yet the story we hear on this day, John’s story of the Crucifixion, is on some level less horrific than the others in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Jesus demonstrates great power and authority, as the soldiers step back and fall to the ground in the garden when Jesus identifies himself.
Before Pilate, Jesus insists calmly that he has been born to testify to the truth, and does not shrink from it. No one has to carry Jesus’ cross – he carries it by himself. There is no cry of dereliction from the cross, no despair that God has forsaken him. Jesus’ only sign of need is to say he is thirsty.
I am glad that we have all the different stories of Jesus’ death. I am glad of the witness in Mark, Matthew, and Luke to Jesus’ full humanity, the testimony that this was not all a show of pretend suffering. And today, I am also grateful for this other declaration from John: that Jesus’ suffering and death is not an example of divine child abuse, or a glorification of oppression. It is good to be reminded that Jesus, the fully human Jesus, was not forced to the cross by God, but chose freely to do what he came to do. Above all, it is good – more than good, but essential – to be assured that God did nothing less than accept unreservedly all the suffering that human beings must bear.
The Welsh poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas wrote this piece called “The Coming” –
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
This is no divine puppeteer pulling the strings of an unsuspecting Jewish man from Nazareth. This is the Logos, the Word, eternally God, taking on human spirit and flesh, and saying, Let me go there. This is God looking upon us with compassion, with a refusal to leave us alone in our suffering. As I make the sign of cross upon my body, I know that my ritual act is by no means an end in itself. It is not a sign of my virtue. It is, rather, a wish, a hope, a prayer – Because you, Jesus, the Eternal Word made flesh, entered the pain of the world, I am grateful. May I too be ready to follow. May I also say, let me go there. Each sign of the cross, made with wood or metal or human suffering or simply with my own hands, declares and implants within us the knowledge that no agony is beyond God’s presence and power to transform. Even if this day does not seem very Good, we know that it is nevertheless full of God. Because God said and says forever, Let me go there.