Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
April 19, 2019 / Good Friday
John 19:38-42
The immediate epilogue to the crucifixion of Jesus does not feature any of Jesus’ closest friends and disciples. Not Peter, or James, or John, or even Andrew. They have all fled, all deserted, and I think that we can understand this. It would have been dangerous to do otherwise, perhaps even fatal. And so Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple, a man who had hedged his bets during Jesus’ public ministry, comes to Pilate, and asks to have to body of the man that had been crucified. “Nicodemus… also came.”
This is Joseph’s first appearance, but we have met Nicodemus before. Earlier in John’s gospel, Nicodemus was identified as a Pharisee, a strict observer of the traditional and written Jewish law, and commonly held to have pretensions to superior sanctity. When he first encountered Jesus, we know that Nicodemus came to Jesus “by night.”[1] He wanted to keep it dark. Being seen with Jesus could compromise his position.
We have the sense that all of that is over, now. All of Jesus’ work, his healing, his raising of Lazarus, his notoriety, the exotic and dangerous rush of fame for the disciples… it was all over, having amounted to no more than the dust and ashes of the Cross. And so, after these things, Joseph and Nicodemus take possession of the body of our crucified Lord, to lay it to rest.
After these things. This is where we all live our lives, and one can’t avoid asking where we ourselves might appear in the Good Friday narrative. Where do we fit in, in this ancient, somewhat grotesque story of sorrow and disappointment?
W.H. Auden, the English poet and critic, addressed this very question, and his words bear repeating this afternoon.
Just as we are all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church. It seems to me worthwhile asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I’m certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin.
In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight – three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, ‘It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute people humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?’ Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the True, the Good and the Beautiful.[2]
Auden’s honesty is instructive, at least for me. At worst, we might be members of the jeering crowd. At best, we would walk on by, shaking our heads at the mania of the mob, at the grotesqueries of the state, at the deprivations of the time in which we’re living. “What ever happened to civil discourse?” we might say. “If only things could be more civilized, more tasteful, more correct, this could have all been resolved.”
The difficult thing to accept about Good Friday is the necessity and utility of the Cross, of Jesus’ taking on of our full humanity, of his having “become obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”[3] It can be tempting to flee, with Peter, and James, and John, and even Andrew, saying, “It wasn’t supposed to end this way!”
Edwin Muir, the Scottish poet and novelist, begins his stark and beautiful poem, “The killing,” in this way:
That was the day they killed the Son of God
On a squat hill-top by Jerusalem.[4]
In the poem, all sorts of people come to the Cross, “the hardened old and the hard-hearted young,” though in the end they are disappointed by death and feel cheated. It was not the spectacle they had hoped for. Only the women wait patiently, watching, not moving all day. And the poem ends with a question:
Did a God
Indeed in dying cross my life that day
… he on his road and I on mine?
That is the Good Friday question, which answers itself, actually, by telling us where we fit into the story. By dying, for our sake, the Son of God crossed all of our lives that day, which is why, on this day, we venerate that symbol of torture and death. The Cross of Christ is what gives meaning to meaningless suffering. The Cross is what gives meaning to the inevitability of death. The Cross is what gives meaning to those parts of our lives, and the lives of the people we know, and the lives of everyone around the world, which we all would just rather forget.
The Cross is the sign and symbol of God’s love for humanity, the eternal mark of God’s uniting himself with us, forever, even after these things.