Good Friday
By Very Reverend John Arnold, Friday 22nd April, 2011
1. Father, forgive
When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’ (Luke 23: 33f.).
The Evangelist simply says, in one word, ‘they crucified’ him; he does not go into details or add his own emotions as commentary upon the bare fact. A Gospel is epic, not lyric; emotion is there but by the time it is written down it has been recollected in tranquillity, in that peace of God, which surpasses understanding. But that peace had been bought at a price and the first Christians knew the value of the coinage because crucifixion, for all that each instance was uniquely tragic and agonising, was an everyday event in the outlying provinces of the Roman Empire.
At the centre of Luke’s crowded scene, where the intensely intimate, secret and hidden things of the heart intersect with politico-military events and ecclesiastical intrigue at the world historical level, there is a young carpenter; and because the world is turned upside down by sin, he is not hammering and nailing, he is being hammered and nailed, sharing the fate not only of his fellow men but also of the uncomplaining timber, which also dies for men, though all unwitting. His tormentors are temporary and part time carpenters of a kind. And whenever and by whatever means human beings, living subjects, are treated by their fellows as if they were inanimate objects, then the same topsy turvy pattern of the crucifixion is traced out again in lesser calvaries.
It is the beginning of the end of his passion. He still has life and breath and consciousness. He continues his work and ministry even to the end. He prays for forgiveness; and that is not something we should take for granted, or we lapse into the cynical blasphemy of Voltaire: ‘Dieu pardonnera, c’est son métier – God will forgive, after all it’s his job’. It isn’t; his job is making things. Father and Son are creator and carpenter. Forgiveness is a bonus – it is undeserved, unmerited; it is pure grace. Like the quality of mercy,
It is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed.
It blesses him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
the throned monarch better than the crown…
It is an attribute to God himself.’[1]
2. Today you will be with me in Paradise.
One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ (Luke 23: 39-43)
The Cross is a permanent reminder of the cost to God of a mysterious offer made to man, called variously forgiveness, acceptance, atonement. The offer can be accepted or it can be rejected; and St Luke dramatises the choice and its consequences in the episode of the two robbers, who both begin by joining in the general mockery of Jesus, taking their cue from their rulers: ‘If this is the Christ of God, let him save himself.’ Satan in the wilderness had tested Jesus at the start of his ministry with one ‘if’: ‘If you are the Son of God’; and Jesus had stood that test. Now the value of that first victory becomes apparent as at the end of his ministry he stands the same test in even more difficult circumstances and wins his first victory as saviour in extremis, demonstrating even on the gallows the power of God to save, the meaningfulness of human choice, and therefore of human life itself.
In this battle between light and darkness, life and death, condemnation and salvation one man changes sides as the prototype and forerunner of all who since that moment have turned from sin to the crucified Christ and put their trust in him. He begins with basic faith and religious sense – ‘Do you not fear God?’ This is a precondition for repentance; and then he responds to something he perceives in Jesus and admits both his own criminality and the justice of his punishment. Of course there must be reasons and extenuating circumstances and of course the punishment is barbarously exaggerated, for what crime could possibly deserve crucifixion? But these are armchair arguments; and a man in need of salvation does well to prefer justification by faith to justification by self. Self-justification gets you nowhere. In a few words the penitent thief trusts in God, confesses his own sin, acknowledges Jesus’ innocence and recognises him as king.
Perhaps he had read the ironic superscription in its Aramaic form, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, for he addressed Jesus by name. This is the only place in the Gospels where anyone simply addresses our Lord as ‘Jesus’, the name, which is above every name and which after all, is a simple sentence meaning ‘God saves’. We may well meditate on what the Saviour’s words would mean to him; but what must it have meant to Jesus to be called by name by a fellow human being, a fellow sufferer on the cross? Kindness and love of neighbour were being offered by the thief, like a cup of cold water to a thirsty man, a cup which, as Jesus had promised, would receive its reward. He said ‘Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom’.
Jesus said to him ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ The answer exceeds the request. God is always ready to give more than we either desire or deserve. Strictly speaking, ‘in Paradise’ adds nothing to ‘you will be with me’; but it was an exquisite touch of personal pastoral care by the good shepherd to one lost sheep, in speaking to a man tortured like himself by thirst under the burning noonday sun, to add to the greater promise ‘you will be with me’ the lesser but more pictorial and therefore more easily grasped ‘in Paradise’, in a cool, enclosed park or pleasure garden, all green leaves and cool shade and running water, like Eden before the Fall.
3. Here is your son, here is your mother
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home (John 19: 26, 27).
Mary appears only twice in St John’s Gospel, at the beginning, at Cana in Galilee, and at the end, at Calvary; and yet her presence at these two turning points is so powerful, that she appears to inhabit the whole story. If, as tradition has it, Mary was by then a widow, Jesus as only son would be responsible for her welfare. So here we have a remarkable example of Jesus, having loved his own, loving them to the end and that, not simply as an emotion but by practical service and by fulfilling family obligations in accordance with the spirit and the letter of the law of Moses.He sees his beloved disciple also – the two people he loves most on earth comprehended in a single glance and undivided vision. The time has come for Jesus, while still taking care for family relationships, to transcend them. He says, ‘Woman, here is your son’; and then to the disciple, ‘here is your mother’, in mutual commendation, establishing a relationship with simple words, which recall contemporary formulas of adoption. It is part of a pattern, which we see in the life and teaching of Jesus, in which that which is natural comes first, and then that which is spiritual.
Family relationships are immensely important but they are not the only relationships. They must in any case at some stage cease to be exclusive and all-embracing; and where primary relationships with parents have been seriously spoilt, people may need to be released, even saved, from them. So the salvation which Jesus brings avails not only for the sadism which took institutional form in the Roman Empire, but also for the myriads of little lives of ordinary people strangled in the tentacles of their families. During his ministry Jesus had broken the bonds of the middle eastern natural family by stating that anyone who did the will of his heavenly father was brother, sister and mother to him (Mark 3: 35); but he retained the loyalty and affection and love of his mother and siblings, who were at the heart of the primitive church. And, if some of his sayings about the family seem harsh, we should remember that, having left the hearth at Nazareth with its given relationships, he found an alternative family by choice and by what Goethe would later call Wahlverwandschaft, elective affinity, with Lazarus and Mary and Martha, whom he loved, at Bethany. It is the example of Jesus and the victory won by him on the cross that makes the Christian heir to the possibilities of an immense richness and variety of warm and intimate and affectionate relationships.
Suddenly, compared with the claustrophobic narrowness of tribal or village life, personal relationships blossom under the new covenant. They have their own disciplines and renunciations; and the incest taboo between next of kin, which is universal in the natural family, is transferred intact to the extended family, which is the church. So we find Paul telling the young Bishop Timothy to treat an older man like a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters ‘with absolute purity’ (1Timothy 5: 1f). Once this principle is accepted, limitless personal resources are available for the blessing and healing of wounded souls. These things are possible when the natural is not suppressed or denied, but offered, taken with thanksgiving, broken and given for many, like the life and loves of Jesus, son of Mary, and son of the Father.4. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi. Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15, 33f.).
The beloved disciple goes away with Mary, and it is as if the little light of human contact goes out with them and darkness covers the whole land, nature itself in awful harmony with the drama, which is being played out below (Mark 15: 33 cf Matthew 27: 45; Luke 23, 40). Then at the ninth hour, when the end is near, Jesus cries aloud, which is probably all that is meant by “with a loud voice”; this is not that final loud cry of triumph, for which he needed to have his lips moistened; this is a cry from the very depths. But what did Jesus mean by quoting ‘Eloi, eloi lema sabachthani?’ from Psalm 22. The Evangelists translate ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ But are we really to believe that Jesus was forsaken by God, indeed that God forsakes anyone? Many have tried to explain this as simply the sad start of a psalm, which ends happily.
Perhaps we should pause for a while at the foot of the cross, and note that the words as they stand are most readily understood as words of absolute dereliction and despair. One reason for taking the quotation at face value is that it speaks to the hearts of those who in every age feel themselves, know themselves, to be utterly forsaken, lost and derelict, when isolation and the absence of every physical and mental comfort ‘leaves the world to darkness and to me’. It speaks as nothing else does to the tragedy and futility of human life, and it says ‘Jesus has been here too’. When we say in the Creed, ‘he descended into hell’, we ought not to restrict the meaning and scope of that descent to the three days after his death. Many who live a living death know that it is even now that they are in hell; and this interpretation encourages them to say with the psalmist, ‘if I go down into hell, thou art there also’ (Psalm 139: 7).
Perhaps it really was, as it has come to be called, dereliction. I believe it was. I believe that, mercifully and only for a while, Jesus, before he lost all consciousness, lost the consciousness, which had sustained him from infancy throughout his ministry, of the immediate presence and power of his heavenly Father, such was the weight and enormity of the sin of the world. To say ‘lost’ is not quite the right word; it implies too great passivity. Jesus willed actively to give it up, to take this upon himself, to be totally overwhelmed by the power of darkness, so that he had no foreknowledge or certainty of the risen life, no assurance of anything but that he would die in torment. The risk he took of annihilation, his vulnerability to nothingness, was at that moment total. Yet even the cry of total dereliction is addressed to God: where else? There is a kind of passionate atheism, a crying out to the God who is no longer an object of mental certainty, which is infinitely deeper and closer to God’s heart, and to which, as he has shown in the Resurrection of Jesus, he responds, more than to bloodless and genteel theism, the mere notional assent to propositions about his existence, or superficial protestations of affection and obedience.
Is it fanciful, I wonder, to see in Jesus’ ability, even on the cross, to say ‘My God’ good news for nihilists, atheists and agnostics, a pointer towards and warrant for the confession of faith of those who, like doubting Thomas, have experienced so deeply the crucifixion of their hopes, that they are not taken in by easy and second hand assurances but simply gaze upon his wounds and say ‘My Lord and my God!’ ? (John 20: 28).
5. I thirst
After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty’. A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. (John 19, 28).
Even at the end, Jesus reigns; subject to the forces, which he created and which are now crushing the life out of him, he causes them to bear his meaning and purposes. He knows now that all is finished; but it is not enough that he should know it, it has to be proclaimed. And for that he needs his parched mouth and throat moistened, so he says ‘I am thirsty’. This is the only reference to pain or even discomfort, and its motive is not alleviation but proclamation.
John comments, ‘in order to fulfil the scripture’. This should not be taken as meaning that Jesus, like a well-rehearsed actor, was simply speaking lines written for him in the Hebrew Scriptures. ‘So that’ is much closer in meaning to ‘and so’. Jesus said ‘I am thirsty’ and in this way the scriptures were fulfilled. John has in mind a verse from Psalm 69 (verse 21) ‘for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink’. This was part of the destiny of the Lord’s Messiah, the suffering servant of God; and both in the original psalm and in Luke’s account of the crucifixion, the offer of sour wine or vinegar is an additional petty and spiteful humiliation. In John Jesus thirsts and drinks; and each of these actions has a deeper meaning. We tend to think of thirst either as passive, something that happens to us, or as an involuntary state: I am thirsty. But here, as in the old translation, it is an activity: ‘I thirst’. He thirsts as they do, of whom he once said, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled’ (Matthew 5: 6). He thirsts as they do of whom the Psalmist sings:
Like as the heart desireth the water brooks: so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, Yea, even for the living God. (Psalm 42: 1-2).
Throughout his life and in his death, Jesus thirsted with these two great thirsts: the thirst for justice and the thirst for God. More than anything else the world needs men and women who will thirst this double thirst, even if, like Oscar Romero, Janani Luwum or the Prior of Taizé, it kills them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mother Theresa, Desmond Tutu – wherever you see inspiring leadership in the Christian tradition, you see the thirst for God and the thirst for justice yoked together; and wherever one of these thirsts is thirsted on its own without the other, there is that imbalance which technically is called heresy, and which always leads to schism. Various kinds of political ideology and of utopianism thirst for justice, but, lacking the thirst for God, they lead to new forms of oppression, futility and despair. Various kinds of cults and meditative techniques thirst for God, but lacking the thirst for righteousness, they turn in on themselves and, missing neighbour, they miss God too. It is not a simple matter for Jesus to say ‘I thirst’.
Having at the start refused the kindly offer of drugged wine in order that he might die actively, alert, with all his faculties intact, he now receives this vinegar and drinks. He had spoken of the sufferings that lay ahead of him as a cup; and for the persecuted Christians of the early church, too, the cup was not only a cup of rejoicing, a foretaste of the banquet in the kingdom of heaven. It was also a bitter cup, a cup of sorrow and of suffering. It is, among other things, a commemoration of his Cross and Passion, whenever in the Eucharist we obey his command and do this in remembrance of him.
6. It is finished
When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit (John 19: 30).
All the evangelists record that before he died, Jesus cried out in a loud voice. Only John tells us what he said; ‘It is finished.’ He is revealed as victor, not in spite of but because of his cry. The last thing it is, is a cry of relief or of self-pity. It is a cry of triumph and of achievement; and it is as such that it is presented in the Gospels. The usual English translation ‘It is finished’, with the hint of ‘Now it’s over’, does not do it justice. Its full meaning is a mixture of ‘it is completed, it is consummated, it is fulfilled.’ I like the German, ‘Es ist vollbracht’, especially as set by Johann Sebastian Bach.
The first thing the evangelists intend their readers to see fulfilled is ‘everything written about [the Messiah] in the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms’ (Luke 24: 44). This is done partly by adding details such as the dicing for Jesus’ possessions from Psalm 27 or the offer of vinegar to drink from Psalm 69. This style of presentation does not necessarily speak directly to us; but it was just the way to present the astonishing facts of the crucifixion of Christ to men and women of the 1st century. We always have difficulty in communicating something absolutely new and unique; it can only be conveyed in terms of the old and familiar, in this case by quotation from the Hebrew Scriptures.
But Jesus had not only fulfilled the expectations of men and women, looking for the consolation of Israel. More than that, he had fulfilled the expectations of God. As he himself said ‘I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do’ (John 17: 4). Of course, the passion must be described in terms of passivity, of Jesus learning obedience through the things he suffers, (Hebrews 5: 8). But it must also be understood as a work, as the work, the Father had given him to do. Enduring, hanging on, keeping going, is worthwhile work; there are many human situations of stress or confrontation or harassment or provocation where that is the case. The work of healing the broken-hearted and the broken-spirited always has this as a vital component. So does the work, to which all of us some day should turn our hands, of dying, of holy dying as a positive act and achievement, like Jesus. On the cross it is the power of sin and death and hell, which is broken and defeated, not the spirit of God and man in Jesus. ‘I was dead, and see, I am alive for evermore; and I have the keys of (ie power over) Death and Hades (Revelation 1: 18).
Jesus cried out, ‘It is finished’. For the Word of God, the agent of creation, finishing things is his typical activity, finishing a creation which can be seen as good but not yet perfect, finishing tables and chairs and ploughs and carts in the Nazareth workshops of Joseph and Son, making yokes that fit easily so that burdens are light, finishing the work which his father has given him to do, the agent of our salvation and the example of what we might become in him, the ‘author and finisher of our faith’ (Hebrews 12: 2).
7. Father into your hands I commend my spirit
Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last (Luke 23:46).
John continues: ‘Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit’. Although he alone of the evangelists records the bowing of the head, he adds no words. For him, ‘it is finished’ is the end, it is the glory of the cross, nothing verbal can be added to it; but the word is completed and prolonged by an action, as a greeting might be by a kiss or handshake, or a farewell by a bow or wave. He bowed his head. This is an action, positively willed by Jesus himself as his last act on earth. John does not say ‘his head fell forward’ or ‘he collapsed’, any more than any of the evangelists ever simply says ‘He died’, or implies that his life was taken from him. The life of Jesus was not stolen from an unsuspecting or helpless victim. On the contrary, he gave it, of his own volition; he bowed his head and gave up his spirit (John 19: 30). But to whom did he give it? To the centurion and the four Roman soldiers who were the agents of his crucifixion? To the scribes and chief priests, the Sanhedrin and the High Priest? To Herod and Pontius Pilate? To the crowd, both of Jews and, as Acts records, of people from every nation under heaven? To you and me? No, not exactly. He gave up his life for us; but, more than that, he gave it up to the Father, bowing his head with limitless trust and affection and in humble and grateful adoration. The last action of Jesus on earth is meek and pious, intimate though public, a worshipful and thankful, you might almost say eucharistic, attitude towards the God and Father of all, accompanied by appropriate words. ‘Father’ he says, ‘into your hands I commend my spirit.’
The word ‘commend’ (or in some translations ‘commit’) was a word in common use for the depositing of something valuable with a friend or relative. That is Jesus’ attitude to his life, both something precious, and also something that can be given up. This choice of word is one of the points where we can see that, for all the voluntariness of the death of Christ as self-oblation in a consciously willed act, it is as far from suicide as it is from accident. There is no false pathos, nothing world-weary or life-denying about this death. It is a true offering, and a pattern of all offering, because the life that is given up is loved and cherished and appreciated, as only a gift from a beloved father can be
Jesus commits his spirit to the Father, and the word for spirit is rightly taken here basically to mean his human life. That is the gift, which he is entrusting to the Father’s keeping. But there is an additional meaning, for it is the same word as is used for the Holy Spirit. Jesus had described his death with the words ‘I am going to the Father’ and to the amazement of his disciples he had said that it was expedient that he should go away (John 16: 17). The Father would send them another comforter, even the spirit of truth who would be with them forever (John 14: 16). The story of the fulfilment of that promise is told in different ways. Luke tells of a dramatic and public outpouring of the spirit at Pentecost; John of a more intimate gift to the disciples behind locked doors on Easter Day. But he prepares for this, by showing how, at the very moment of his going away, Jesus, as it were, makes the spirit, which is also his spirit, available, even if its availability is not taken up until disciples respond with faith in the Resurrection. This sacrifice is not just a death; it is an outpouring of life.
8. Truly, this was the Son of God
Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised… Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’ Matthew 27: 50-52, 54 ).
The mood changes completely. After the affectionate intimacy of Father, Son and Spirit, suddenly all is public and dramatic again. There has already been darkness. Now there is an earthquake and apparitions, the rending of the veil and the centurion’s confession. In Matthew’s narrative all these things, like the extraordinary occurrences surrounding the birth of Jesus, indicate that the death of Jesus, too, is an Act of God, of God in man, it is true, but also of God in nature, in history, and in the public life of church and state.
The veil, or rather veils, for there were two enormous curtains right across the width of the building, were an essential part of the Temple, dividing the Holy Place where the daily services took place from the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest went once a year on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. The strength and weakness of the religion of the old covenant was that it stressed separation, the separation of clean and unclean, the separation of Jew and Gentile and above all the separation of man and God, which could only be temporarily overcome by the fulfilment of the law regarding sacrifices. The rending of the veil symbolises the opening up of direct access to the presence of God through the death of Jesus, the perfect sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. It is this insight above all which has formed the churches’ understanding of the eucharist or Holy Communion as a sacrifice and means of access to the Father through the Son ( Hebrews 10: 19-22.)
For Paul, however, the chief effect of the death of Christ is that in Christ Jesus the Gentiles, who were far off, have now been brought near through the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2: 13). And of this, at the foot of the cross, at the very moment of the death of Christ, the Roman centurion is the first fruit and example. The earthquake, the apparitions and the rending of the veil are scenery; they fade into the background when human speech holds the centre of the stage. Just as in the story of Elijah, it could be said ‘Now there was a great wind, … but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice’ (1 Kings 19 11- 12), so also Matthew, after all the stupendous audio visual effects in his crucifixion story, ends the drama with a still small voice, ‘Truly, this was the Son of God.’Amen.
