April 10, 2009 | Good Friday

Ways We Have Tried to Understand

Adam Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 22
John 18:1–27
John 19:1–42

There is much I would like to know about this story. The stories to which I am accustomed provide a different kind of detail than this ancient one. The world in which you and I live wants to know what happens between the lines of this story. “Tell us more about that day, so long ago,” we want to say to John. What was it like to be there?

Was the high priest a bad man through and through, rotten to the core, or was he just trying to protect the Jews who were in his charge? Did he think he was doing the right thing? Was he afraid of Jesus? These are questions we would like to have answered, because sometimes we protect ourselves, our positions, our loved ones, by acting out of fear at the cost of someone else.

Was Pilate really evil, or was he just clueless? What had he been told about Jesus? What was his relationship with that high priest? What does it mean when he asks Jesus, “What is truth?” These are questions we would like to have answered, because sometimes out of our own ignorance we act in ways that are wrong or we do so because we refuse to work any harder to find out the truth.

What about all the unnamed people on the scene? Why does Jesus forgive them all, even as they go along with the crowd, finding him guilty after an unjust trial, even as they beat him and hang him up to die? These are questions we would like to have answered, because sometimes we allow others to suffer while we go along with the crowd.

We would like to know more of the details of this story. We know that fear and laziness and injustice and helplessness are often what motivates our own actions. So we want to know those things about this story from the Gospel of John.

We want to know details about Jesus, too. What was it like for him? The Bible tells us little about what the beating and the hanging were like for Jesus; we’re fascinated with those missing pieces of violence and suffering.

It seems significant to us what Cicero said about crucifixion being the Roman Empire’s most extreme form of punishment. What was its effect on human physiology? How long might he have had to hang there?

Artists have tried to picture it for us. Exposed ribs, the wounds in his hands and his side, the droplets of blood coming from beneath that crown of thorns.

Our modern sensibilities are drawn in by the cinematic filling-in of the gaps in the story, as well. Martin Scorcese tells us what Jesus’ relationships were like with the few who waited at the foot of that cross; Mel Gibson provides all the gory details about how horrendous the beating must have been.

What was the pain like? How long did it last? Did it ever end? These are questions we would like to have answered, because our lives are full of pain as well.

The temptation, for those of us who preach, is to provide this kind of detail for you. I’m tempted to give you some information, to explain why crucifixion would have been the appropriate way for Jesus to die, to tell you how he felt and what they thought and how you can know what will happen to you when you die because of it. I want to give you something extra to take with you, to help you make sense of it all before Easter morning arrives.

But that denies what the story does tell us and what it leaves out on purpose: the story tells us that Jesus was tried and found guilty and was hung on a cross and that he died, all at the hands of people like us. The story tells us that Jesus was betrayed and wounded and deserted and lost people he had loved very much. Many of us have experienced that, too.

We are often innocent, and yet we find ourselves suffering. We fall in love, and we lose love. We read in the paper about civilians living in terrorized war zones, and we meet people in our own city who have lost young children to gun violence. We see people in our neighborhoods and in our newspapers set up and punished for no fault of their own.

We also know about unjust trials and punishments that are far too severe. Each of us, in our own ways, accuse others of wrongdoing when they are innocent. When we can, we allow others to suffer in our place because we are afraid. We wash our hands of the case. We are a people who live on both sides of injustice in a world where things are often not as they are supposed to be. And on this day, we are reminded that Jesus has seen it all.

The great teacher of preaching, George Buttrick, used to say that when getting ready to climb into the pulpit, a preacher should always be thinking, “I have good news for these people”—an interesting thought to ponder on Good Friday, when the most obvious question seems to be “What’s so ‘good’ about it?”

I think the answer has little to do with denying the darkness of Good Friday—or the darkness in our own lives, for that matter. The thing that is so good about Good Friday has everything to do with the fact that Jesus has seen it all. And on a day when there is much that goes unexplained, that just might be enough.

I want to remind you of a few things about the way John tells this story of Jesus’ death:

In the midst of trials and punishments and a sentence of death, Jesus fulfills the scriptures, reminding us that God is with him on the way to death. When Jesus is judged according to the law, when they cast lots for his clothing, when he says before his death, “I am thirsty,” John reminds us that he does it to fulfill the scriptures, to tell us that God is with him.

In his weakest hour, when Jesus has been derided and flogged, other Gospel writers report that someone was appointed to carry the cross for him, but John says that Jesus picks up his own cross and carries it. On that cross is the full weight of the injustice and suffering and deception in the lives of the people who saw Jesus that day, and on that cross is the full weight of the injustice and suffering and deception in every one of us. And Jesus picks it up and carries it with God’s help, says John, so we need not be burdened with our sins any longer.

When Jesus is hung on the cross, most of his followers have left him, but his mother, Mary, and the disciple he loved stand there at the foot of the cross, and Jesus tells them to treat one another as mother and son. Even as he dies, Jesus leaves us with a promise that love and care can and will go on without betrayal. God will see to it.

They post the sign above his head—“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”—and the priest rejects it, and we know that even when we try to deny or reject Christ’s kingship, Christ will still be loyal to us; Christ is still willing to be known as our king.

One of the worst mistakes we can make is to try to get through this day without acknowledging the reality of suffering. It is all around us. The story bears witness to that. Our lives bear witness to that.

But an even worse oversight is to assume that because Christ suffers, God is absent. God does not disappear at the cross and emerge again only at the event of Easter. Even in Jesus’ abandonment, God was there.

It seems to me that the fascination with the details, with greater understanding about this dark day in history, is that if we could better understand Jesus’ darkness, perhaps we might better understand the darkness in our own lives. But in the way this story is told, God seems to say, “You don’t need to know any more about suffering. You’re human. You already know more about suffering than I want you to know. What God wants to say is that in your suffering, you are not alone. You belong to God.

In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah says,

[Our savior] shall startle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of him;
for that which had not been told they shall see,
and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.

In the suffering servant of God, we look for things we have not been told and we think about things we did not hear. But in the midst of questioning the mysteries, do not miss the promise of God:

For [our Savior] grew up like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.