Homily for Good Friday 2009
How did Jesus get to this awful place?
Why does Jesus die on a cross rather than in bed as an old man?
More and more I see Good Friday
as the collision between the Kingdom of the Triune God
and the Kingdom of Herod, the Kingdom of Rome.
Jesus is not an unwitting victim
who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The passion of Jesus that we remember and celebrate today
is continuous with the passion of his entire ministry.
Jesus is on the cross because he heals on the Sabbath,
whether it was a bent-over daughter of Abraham
(Luke 13.10-17) or the man born blind (John 9).
Jesus is on the cross because he forgives sins.
"Which is easier to say,
your sins are forgiven or take up your mat and walk.
So that you may know
that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins,"
Jesus says to the paralyzed man,
"take up your mat and walk" (Mark 2.1-12).
This healing and forgiving sins on the Sabbath
sometimes in the presence of scribes and Pharisees
is not the way to win friends and influence people.
Jesus is on the cross because he eats with sinners,
tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers,
the poor, the marginal (Luke 15.1-2).
This is not just a matter of violating the rules of polite society;
it is challenging beliefs about who is saved and how,
about the nature of God's love for the world.
Jesus embodies unconditional love -- upfront.
Jesus is on the cross because
the parables turn out not to be such harmless,
safe stories after all.
Religious and political leaders understand
them well enough to recognize their challenge.
Their reaction is:
"I don't quite know what you mean by that story
but I already know I don't like it."
In other words, the Kingdom of God
is not unintelligible and undefined,
a vague field of marshmallow-like good feeling.
The proclamation has prophetic, political, religious, and theological ideas
about who God is in relationship to the creation,
to all human beings.
Moreover, the Kingdom of God is not just ideas and talk,
five epistemologies in an evening,
not one of them coherent enough to sustain and nourish a life.
As proclaimer, Jesus is liberating love in action.
The passion of Jesus' entire ministry
unfolds and is made visible and explicit on the cross.
God so loves the world, loves the creation, loves humankind
that he sends his only Son,
not to condemn it, but to bring fullness of life, to redeem it.
This self-emptying love,
in the face of human hatred and hardness of heart
is the only real pathway to redemption.
"On the cross 'the law of revenge
becomes the law of redeeming love.'
The curse is repaid with a blessing.
The conspiracy of hatred
is answered by an outpouring of love."1
Some take-home messages:
In the book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes,
"When Christ calls a woman or man,
he bids her or him to come and die."
Strong, harsh words to hear,
especially when we remember that Bonhoeffer was martyred by the Nazis.
His own path of discipleship, the way of the cross,
involves personal transformation,
but also a deadly confrontation with the powers that ruled the world.
The way of the cross, as the Gospels say repeatedly,
is about discipleship, which is the way of the cross.
Second, suffering is everywhere --
with our advanced communication
we are probably more aware of human suffering
than any previous generation of people.
At the same time, we are not any more able to relieve most of it.
We never have to bother to create suffering --
as you know, it comes to us,
sometimes out of nowhere.
We are living our lives,
we are minding our own business, and yet there it is.
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4
that "we are always carrying about in the body
the dying of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body (1 Cor. 4.10)."
Many years ago,
a recovering alcoholic at the Saint Cloud treatment center
said that he was moved to gratitude
for all those who suffered and died as alcoholics,
never getting to sobriety.
But he believed that somehow their suffering,
coupled to the cross of Christ,
made possible the grace for his own sobriety.
I don't want to go to the wall on the theology of this statement
but it is compelling enough to me that I remember it 35 years later.
Over the course of two thousand years,
the cross has become of universal symbol of suffering humanity.
It is a paradoxical sign of God's compassionate love for the world
who does not do an end-run on suffering
but goes through it with us to new, resurrected life.
The cross tells us the truth about innocent human suffering,
that it will always be part of human experience on this planet.
It also tells us the truth about how God embraces this suffering
and gives it a significance beyond our immediate time and place.
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
April 10, 2009
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