Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

Good Friday (29 March) 2024
(Isaiah 52:13-53:12, Psalm 22:1-11, Hebrews 10:1-25, John 19:1-37)

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I once read somewhere that the only proper response to the Akedah, the story of the binding and near sacrifice of Isaac, is to put your hand over your mouth and to say nothing at all. The story is unspeakable in that it lies beyond words to frame or express the great mystery at its heart. If that is true of the Akedah, which serves primarily as a signpost pointing toward the fulfillment of the story in Jesus, then how much more is it true of the Crucifixion? As a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth, Isaiah writes about Jesus before his accusers. But those words likely should apply also to us — perhaps first of all to preachers, perhaps first of all to me — standing before the cross. And, if we cannot be silent — and it does seem that something must be said — then at least we can be prayerful.

The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit.
Let us pray.

Both here and in all your churches throughout the whole world,
we adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. Amen.

In 1937 Pablo Picasso painted what is arguably his most well known and influential work: an enormous canvas — 11.5 feet tall by 25.5 feet long — showing the horrors of war, specifically the bombing of the Basque village of Guernica during the early years of the Spanish Civil War. It shows — large scale and yet in intimate detail — the violence, the chaos, the human and animal suffering attendant human power struggles: fire and smoke, wounded animals, a dismembered soldier, a screaming mother holding her lifeless baby — a panorama of human misery writ large across all creation, and all under the watchful eye of a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling, the eye of God, if there is a god, watching his creation spiraling downward toward the tohu va bohu, the original chaos that preceded God’s “Let there be.” Such is the nature of war as Picasso depicts it.

Using not paint but only words on vellum or parchment, St. John created a similar panorama some two millennia earlier — an enormous mural not of war or a particular battle, but of the human sin and degradation that spans the whole of human history and the better part of two chapters of his Gospel. It is more horrible and sweeping than Picasso could imagine, and more all-inclusive; if we look closely, we find ourselves there. Let’s linger a few moments to take it in.

Judas figures prominently in the mural as he leads a band of soldiers into the Garden across the brook Kidron, knowing that Jesus will be there. A pointing of fingers, a greeting, a kiss: an act of human treachery so sinful, so faithless and puzzling that two thousand years later we are still left scratching our heads in disbelief. A man who had healed in Jesus’ name, cast our demons in Jesus’ name, heard the words of life from Jesus’ lips, had his feet washed just hours earlier by Jesus’ own hands now betrays him. Verses from Psalm 55 add their color to the painting:

12 For it is not an enemy who has done me this dishonor, *
for then I could have borne it;
13 Neither was it my adversary who exalted himself against me, *
for then I would have hidden myself from him.
14 But it was you, my companion, *
my comrade and my own familiar friend.
15 We took sweet counsel together *
and walked in the house of God as friends (Ps 55:12-15, BCP 2019, p. 338).

Judas isn’t alone; there are soldiers gathered around him in the mural, soldiers complicit in the great betrayal simply by following their orders, simply by being part of a machine that grinds people up and spits them out with unthinking efficiency. It is not treachery, certainly; perhaps indifference describes it better, but no less a sin than treachery.

When the soldiers have apprehended Jesus, they take him to Caiaphas the high priest and his father-in-law Annas, the true puppet master pulling the religious strings. And St. John reminds us that it was Caiaphas who had “advised the Jews that it would be expedient that one man should die for the people,” the great sin of scapegoating. And isn’t that term telling, scapegoating — the sloughing off of the sins of the people onto an innocent victim that is then driven out to its destruction? We know nothing about that do we? The Nazis scapegoated the Jews, the Romany, the homosexuals, the defective. The Jim Crow legislators and local thugs scapegoated their African-American fellow citizens, fellow men. The Chinese Communists scapegoated the intellectuals and the Christians. The Hutus scapegoated the Tutsis. And so goes human history. The sin of scapegoating predates the Day of Atonement, though God named it then for what it was and is.

And, standing around a charcoal fire in the High Priest’s courtyard, standing near the light and heat yet somehow still lurking in the shadows of the mural, is Simon Peter, the stalwart disciple who in his bravado had pledged just hours prior to die with Jesus if necessary. “I am not,” he says not once this night but three times when asked if he is Jesus’ disciple. So fearful, so cowardly is he in that moment that the “rock” before whom the gates of hell should tremble finds himself trembling in the presence of a servant girl. Is cowardice a sin? Well, it’s hardly a virtue, and it has certainly felt sinful to me each time I have given way before it. If sin is failure to do and to be what God intends one to do and to be, then sin this was.

Our gaze moves on from Peter in the High Priest’s courtyard to Jesus in the governor’s headquarters, to the seat of Roman power and justice. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asks Jesus. And, as a later conversation shows, Pilate is not interested in justice or in truth, but rather in preserving Roman order and his own position. “Are you the King of the Jews?” really means, “Are you my rival whom I must destroy?” The gods of power and pride and ambition are worshipped in this palace: self-interest raised to the level of idolatry. When Pilate determines initially to release Jesus, it is not because the thinks the accused innocent or even cares whether he might be, but rather because he deems Jesus inconsequential, of no threat to Rome, of no concern to Pilate. And that is the the sin of what — apathy? But, to mollify the Jewish authorities Pilate turns Jesus over to the soldiers for a little sport, a diversion from the tedium of standing guard perhaps. And, for fun or out of boredom or simply because they have become brutal men whose character it is to dehumanize lesser men, they flog Jesus and mock him with a crown of thorns and a purple robe; they strike him and taunt him. There is a haze of acedia, of slothfulness, covering this part of the mural, of brutal men going through the motions doing brutal things because they have not the energy or interest to do anything else. And sloth is a deadly sin.

Pilate was wrong to think this barbarism would satisfy the priests and Sadducees and Pharisees. No, “Crucify him!” is what it will take. And so we see Pilate sitting on his throne of judgment, figuratively and literally washing his hands of the whole affair in an act of supreme annoyance and indifference, annoyed that the Jews had forced his hand and indifferent to the plight of this Jewish peasant standing bloodied before him. If hatred is a sin — and it is — indifference may be worse still. If I hate you, you at least are worthy of my attention, of my emotional energy. But, if I am indifferent? You matter not at all.

Now there is a sense of movement in the mural, a dark negation of the stunning examples of movement in some great works of art, glorious movement like that which Van Gogh captures in sky and clouds and fields of wheat. This movement is solemn, plodding, heavy. It starts outside Pilate’s judgment hall and goes step-by-step toward the opposite frame of the mural, outside the city. We see Jesus “bearing his own cross to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha.” The mural moves us ploddingly but irresistibly toward the ultimate sin of deicide, the murder of God; we want to avert our eyes, but somehow we can’t. And in his verbal painting of this slow march, even St. John seems to lose his theological nerve for a moment; he is factually correct in his reporting, but wanting in his reflection. St. John tells us that Jesus “went out bearing his own cross,” and that is what our eyes see. But that is not the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Isaiah demands that we look more intently at the image in front of us, that we peer not at it but through it as we do with any icon. St. John tells us that Jesus bore his own cross. Isaiah knows better, paints a fuller picture. It is not his own cross that he bears, and we know it, we see it:

Isaiah 53:4–6 (ESV): 4  Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5  But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
6  All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

And now, here, we enter the mural; our sin takes its place there, laid upon the cross that Jesus carries as his own. We have seen, in portrait and impression, the sin of Judas, of Caiaphas and Annas, of Peter, of Pilate and the soldiers, of self-serving religion and brutal empire, of idolatry and self-interest and cowardice. And Jesus was able to stand under these, but not under the full weight of the cross. It is not in Scripture, but the tradition of Mother Church tells us that Jesus fell under the weight of the cross, that the weight of the sin of the whole world was more than the incarnate Son of God was able to bear in his flesh. Scenes from this mural that I have been describing encircle our nave; it is seen in the Stations of the Cross. And in those fourteen icons of devotion along the Way of the Cross, Jesus falls not just once, but three times under the unfathomable weight he bears:

He who lifts our fallen nature
Low now falls amidst the din,
Bearing more than cross his burden
Grievous load of all our sin,
Deeper, far more sharply cutting
Is the weight he bears within (Francis Gray and Larry Lossing, The Way of the Cross, Parish Press of The Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Fond du Lac, WI).

We keep following the movement in the mural and we see Jesus arrive at Golgotha. Mercifully, as if to spare us graphic images of the consequences of our sin being laid upon the sinless one, St. John simply says, “There they crucified him.” As we look around — now at the cross, now at something else — little details clamor for our attention, further evidence of the sin that suffuses the canvas: Pilate’s final insult to the Jews, an inscription proclaiming “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” a reminder of what Rome thinks about and does to Jewish rebels; the soldiers parting Jesus’ clothes among themselves, the avarice of grave-robbing; the disciples — save only St. John and the holy women — conspicuous by their absence, blank spaces on the canvas where they should have been standing, their self-preservation overcoming devotion. This portion of the canvas is a bit shabby, mankind reduced to its basest level, a bit tired and worn as if entropy were finally consolidating its reign, the wearing down and wearing out of all things. Chesterton got it right: we have sinned and grown old, and the canvas shows our age.

But keep looking; something surpassing strange begins to happen, as if a whirlwind entered the frame and took hold of the images there, uprooting them, tearing them from their familiar moorings, spinning them round and round and moving them with gale force toward a single, focal point. Judas is on the move, lips still puckered as for a kiss, the soldiers, too, though stripped now of their weapons. Caiaphas and Annas are tumbling along, the dignity and authority of the high priesthood left far behind as they scramble and scrabble for something sure to grasp. Even Peter is spinning, dervish-like, with a rooster crowing and flapping about his head. Pilate has been brought down from his throne — ripped from it — no longer in charge but tripping along in procession with the rabble.

The whirlwind keeps growing as it sucks up everything in its path. It is like some great plague of locusts: everything lush before it and barren behind. The hammer and nails are ripped from the soldier’s firm grip as he goes tumbling head over heals. The disciples’ hiding places are demolished as the whirlwind passes over and they are exposed. All things have been cut loose. All things are spinning now. All things are being sucked into the vortex: all treachery, all indifference, all scapegoating, all cowardice, all pride, all selfish ambition and abuse of power, all avarice, all acedia — all the sin of the world throughout all its wearied ages and all ages yet to come, your sin and mine — all of it spinning and whirling and racing inexorably toward a single point as if it is being drawn there. And at that focal point of all that is and was and ever shall be there hangs a man — and more than a man — on a cross. As the whirlwind envelops him, he becomes the still eye of the great storm. It is still enough, quiet enough around him that we catch his final breath as he breathes in the whirlwind, as he takes into and upon himself the raging fury of all the sin of the world, and then breathes out his final words: “It is finished.”

And now, we let our eyes wander over the canvas. The vast panorama of human depravity is stripped clean now, stark white but for two broad brush strokes, one vertical and one horizontal, intersecting at the still point of sin and grace, of heaven and earth, of God and man, not separating the pairs but joining them. And we know that St. John was right when he wrote of Jesus:

1 John 2:2 (ESV): 2 He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

There is mystery here, and wonder. There are chapters of the story yet to be written, an empty canvas on which the Artist can and will fashion a new masterpiece. But those are not for us this day. On this day we stand looking, perhaps through tears, at the two cruciform brushstrokes on the otherwise empty canvas. And we say:

Both here and in all your churches throughout the whole world,
we adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. Amen.