Sermon for Good Friday - The Rev. Jeffrey W. Mello - April 15th, 2022

To view a video of the Rev. Jeffrey W. Mello’s sermon, click HERE.

Hebrews 10:16-25; John 18:1-19:42

Therefore kind Jesus since I cannot pay thee, I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee. Think on thy pity, and thy love unswerving, Not my deserving. - Johann Heerman, “Ah, Holy Jesus” Hymnal 1982 #158

We are a culture obsessed with deserving.

We spend a great deal of time and energy trying to determine whether or not someone deserves something coming their way, good or bad.

Did that celebrity deserve that award? Were they that good? And after what they did?

Does that person in need deserve my assistance? What have they done for me? Why can’t they get it together like I did? Is there someone in greater need?

Did my loved one deserve the pain they are enduring? Did that person, so young, so kind, deserve the tragic events they endured?

Our economy is based on a system of deservedness. Blessings and curses come your way based on what someone thinks you do or do not deserve.

You get a raise if you deserve one, a job if you deserve one.

And curses work the same way. If someone dies from lung cancer with a history of smoking, perhaps they deserved it.

If you are a woman, dressed as you like, and are sexually assaulted, perhaps you deserved it.

These lists are long and the guidelines for who deserves what is often in the hands of the one doing the evaluation.

Today, we are confronted with the hard wood of the cross. We venerate a cross today, because of the time in which Jesus’ execution happened. But it just as well could be a guillotine, an electric chair, or a gun.

Did Jesus deserve it? Well, it depends entirely on who you ask.

Did he have to keep going after he was warned repeatedly to stop? Did he have to upset the moneychangers, argue with the Pharisees? Did he have to shun social conventions of his day, breaking codes and rules to prove a point about God?

Did he have to make himself an altar; a banquet table; a living feast for the world, so as to break every expectation of who was deserving of what?

Perhaps he didn’t. So, one could argue he deserved just what he got.

But, thanks be to God, that is not how God’s economy works, only ours.

In God’s economy, there is no deserving. There is only grace. There is only mercy.

In God’s economy Jesus did not deserve to die on the cross, not because he was Jesus, but because no one deserves to die at the hands of another. Ever.

In God’s economy you do not deserve God’s love because of anything you have said or done. If there is any deserving when it comes to our relationship with God it is because we are God’s children, made in God’s likeness, that we deserve what God longs to give us. Our deserving has nothing to do with us; our successes or our failures.

We are deserving of God’s sacrificial love because God makes us deserving of it.

We are worthy of the abundant grace of God because God has already made us worthy of it.

This bare cross is a symbol of our faith precisely because it was a complete and utter failure. Far from a trophy given to a deserving winner, this hangs in our sanctuary to remind us of what a great and utter failure it was when the state, colluding with religious leadership, tried to stop the banquet of love from happening.

It reminds us of how they tried to take the table of God’s love, break it, and turn it into an implement of silence and fear.

And it failed. It failed.

Because any attempt to stop God’s love from being known will always, in the end, fail.

Because any control we try to exert over the free-flowing Grace of God will always fail.

The cross is empty because it failed to keep the Body of Christ from living. It failed to stop generations of people of faith from continuing to confront injustice and oppression, even as new methods were invented to try.

The cross -- this one, or any other we might try to use on one another to stop the truth of God’s economy of Love from being know -- will always fail.

Yes, there will be moments when we are standing firmly in our own Good Fridays, staring at a cross in our own lives, and wondering if it has, in fact won the day.

But that cross, too, will fail. Because crosses always will.

Jesus met the cross not because he deserved it, though that’s what the powers and principalities of his day might have thought. Jesus met the cross to join us in our own crosses, to prove to us just how limited the power of the cross is, and to defeat it with the sacrifice of his life.

Cross, today you have your moment. But it will be brief. It will be fleeting. And you will lose. Because you always do.

AMEN.

© 2022 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello