For the 2019 Good Friday service on April 19, we followed a lightly modified of this Good Friday Lutheran Tenebrae service outline from the last couple years. No specific text for tonight other than John’s passion reading, although I was additionally inspired by this quick Good Friday reflection on Facebook by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Here’s my sermon.
The cross is the symbol of Christianity. Have you ever stopped to think about how odd that is?
Now, we know the cross is not the end of the story. We know what the women will find when they come to the tomb early on Sunday morning.
We know Jesus has defeated the power of the grave. We know he’s alive.
And there are all kinds of symbols for the resurrection, images like a butterfly emerging transformed out of a cocoon, an egg with its life-giving nourishment contained within a hard shell, the lily with its beauty emerging in the spring out of a dead-looking bulb buried in the ground.
Yet the cross is our primary symbol of faith. People who are not Christians recognize church buildings because they have a cross. This is the marker we put on grave stones. We are used to it, but remember, a cross is not an appealing symbol – it’s a means of death, a method of execution.
If Jesus had come at a different point in history, the symbol of our faith might be a hangman’s noose, or an electric chair, or a needle for lethal injection. I’ve never taken a marketing or branding class, but I’m pretty sure no consultant would ever recommend a brutal instrument of torture as your logo.
The identity marker of our faith is a symbol of defeat, the lowest point in all of history. The man at the center of our hope for eternity was arrested by the government as a criminal and killed. This is the message we proclaim to the world. Isn’t that strange?
And yet, of course, that’s exactly the point. The unique claim of Christianity is that God—the almighty Creator of the cosmos, the one who formed the heavens and the earth—has become one of us. Our God has been born into the world, into a humble peasant family in a backwater village, and lived a full human life, even to the point of death, even to the most painful death we can imagine.
This is what the writer to the Hebrews is talking about. We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.
The cross is the ultimate symbol of God’s love, because it shows just how far God is willing to go for you and me. The story of the cross—the story of Good Friday—is the story of a God who is so much in love with God’s people, so much in love with you, that God is willing to do whatever it takes to be with us.
When we humans failed to live in right relationship with God, when we went our own way of sin, when we separated ourselves from God, God came chasing after us, all the way into our world. On the cross, God makes us righteous, God brings us back into right relationship with our Creator.
Last night, on Maundy Thursday, we heard Jesus give his followers a new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. Wash each other’s feet. Serve one another.
Tonight, we see how far Jesus will go out of love. We see how wide his arms will stretch to reach for his beloved. Jesus, the one who was tested in every way as we are but did not sin, took our sins into himself and put them to death on the cross.
All the wrong things we’ve done, all the times we’ve ignored God, or looked for life on our own, all the times we’ve run away from God, all the punishments we deserve, Jesus our sinless high priest takes and puts to death.
As he cries out from the cross, he is forsaken by God. Our sins separate him from the Father. And Jesus’ death is our atonement – it brings us back to being at one with our Creator. Jesus is separated so we don’t have to be. We claim the cross as our symbol because the cross bridges the gap of our sin and restores us to righteousness, to a right relationship with God.
And on Sunday, we’ll hear the rest of the story, because Jesus’ death is not the end, because God has done what we cannot do. The symbol of death is transformed into the symbol of life. The symbol of defeat becomes the symbol of God’s greatest victory.
As you listen tonight to the story of Jesus’ passion, I invite you to reflect on the miracle of the cross. Think about the awesome love of God who has come to live among us and die for us.
Think about the times you have turned away from God, the sins that separate you from God, the things in your life you’ve put before God.
I invite you to take a minute right now and write some of them down. There’s a piece of paper in your bulletin labeled “My sin.” It has a verse about how our sins separate us from God.
Write down your confession, the things that come between you and God. Don’t put your name on it; this is between you and God. Write in code if you want to, but write something down.
Then, later in the service, you’ll be able to nail it to the cross as a reminder that Jesus has put to death your sins.