Touching and leaning
A sermon on Good Friday
Many walking by the church recently will have seen that our outdoors crucifix has needed some work done. The man who performed the work placed a notice on it while the work is done which you can still see: it says “Do not touch or lean on this post”. Whether he knew it or not, he could scarcely have written a more thought-provoking notice about the Cross. Because today, despite everything that those who made Jesus’s cross wanted it to be for him, since that day billions of people have come to do, in spiritual terms, precisely the reverse of that notice: to touch and lean on this post, the post of the Cross, as an anchor of their lives.
The Romans designed crucifixion as the ultimate form of alienation, suffering and rejection from society. Those who were crucified were nailed up so that literally no one could ever touch them again, no one hold them, no one comfort them, no one help them; but also there was the psychological punishment; to expose them to the most total rejection and abandonment that society could inflict. The person crucified was literally alone. Cursed be he who hangs from a tree, as the Hebrew proverb said.
But such was the ineffable design of God – a plan that no less than God could ever have come up with - that God would reveal himself most of all in that place where nothing divine was thought to lie; would show that most dejected place as the place where God’s glory is seen; would use the sign of rejection as his sign of solidarity with all who suffer; and would take the total hopelessness of the cross, and transform it into the sign of everlasting hope, reconciliation, victory and life. And that is the mystery of the Cross.
More and more it has been my experience, that so often, without any theological study, some people just profoundly, almost intuitively, understand what the Cross means. I said on Palm Sunday, Holy Week is about movement, and it is - for some, more so than for others. Some years ago there was a student pilgrimage which went from the west coast of these Isles to the east coast, in Holy Week. And a whole variety of pilgrims took part. They arrived at Holy Island on Maundy Thursday. One of the pilgrims was a lady who had that past year lost her fiancé in a tragic motorbike accident. When it came to Good Friday, to the liturgy we are celebrating now, she came up to the Cross, as we will. And she brought up with her the motorcycle keys of her dead fiancé. She brought them and placed them at the foot of the Cross. She knew - she just KNEW – that to the Cross she could bring the symbol of all her pain, the worst grief of her life, and leave it; leave it, knowing that Jesus in that moment had entered into her suffering with her and that of the whole world. That what Jesus did on Good Friday was take the suffering that she was going through, that all the world is going through, that which life inflicts on us, that which we inflict on ourselves, he took that, and united himself with that totally, on the Cross; and having done that, he changed the story of suffering. He showed that it was part of his story too. We never suffer alone. As I said last night, before the washing of the feet, we do not worship a far-off God: we have a God with pierced hands and feet. And by what spectacularly happens at Easter, God turns what might have been hopelessness into a promise of hope. Into the knowledge that, though there is suffering in the world, a part of being alive, that suffering can and will be transformed into rebirth and life in his eternal plan for creation.
Good Friday is not a time to speculate or devise a theory. It’s not a time to solve the mystery of evil and suffering. How could we ever do that in any case? The Church has defined many things over the last 2,000 years. One thing it has never done is try to define how Jesus saved the human race that day, how it works. Good Friday is not about theories. Good Friday is a time to contemplate and behold. Behold what God was prepared to do to enter into our imperfect world to accept its imperfection even if it meant that it will kill him, in order to transform the world into him.
Our ancestors wrote of a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree we read about in the book of Genesis. That was a mythical tree. Today in the Cross what we see revealed once and for all is the real tree of the knowledge of good and evil. On that tree good and evil did combat and it reveals to us our story and also God’s.
In 1373 the anchoress Julian of Norwich had 16 mystical visions of Jesus Crucified. It’s a moving experience to go into her cell where she lived in a church in Norwich, which you can still do today. She was those many blessed ones who saw the Cross for what it was. And we can do no better today than to read Mother Julian’s words in her diary years later:
“From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord's meaning. More than fifteen years after that, I was answered. "You would know our 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 on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else – ever."
‘You will not know or learn anything else – ever’. To be a Christian is to know that in the mystery of the Cross is all the summary of who God is, and what we are, that is, what we are worth to him. We are worth everything to him. And the invitation of the Cross is that he be everything to us. He and the creation that he so wonderfully wishes to transform by the Cross. And that is the story of the Resurrection.