A Sermon for Good Friday

 

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

 

Where is God today?

Where is God today?

 

A priest friend once told me that for him, Good Friday was filled with unthinkable news –

Jesus is dead!  And if Jesus is dead, then where is God today?

 

This isn’t just a question for Good Friday.  For many, the question, “Where is God today?” is a question for every day -- and with good reason.  We are now over 8 years into wars which seems without end in lands where some people blow themselves up to kill bystanders of the “wrong” ethnic group or religion.   Every day in Africa, thousands of children die from preventable diseases, and HIV/AIDS continues to spread.  Haiti and Chile still reel from the devastation of earthquakes, and our damaged economy continues to leave people without jobs and without homes.  Race, gender and sexual orientation remain cultural and political flashpoints; the poor remain poor; children are abused; marriages die; friends and family get sick; death comes to old and young -- all of this and more, each and every day.

 

In the face of the ongoing, unchanging facts of evil and suffering, how can we not ask:

“Where is God today?”

 

On Good Friday, we Christians have always had a single response to this question:  God is on the Cross.  Precisely where evil is at work, where people are suffering; where Sin, Satan and Death most seem to rule --  that is where God is, not only on Good Friday, but on every day. 

 

This is not what we expect.  If we expect to find God at all, we expect to find God where joy and wholeness and goodness and life hold sway – and, of course, God is there, too.  But God knows, even if we don’t, that that is not enough.  For God truly to be God and for human beings to be able to trust God with all of our lives – not just the good, but the bad and the ugly, also --

 God must be in those places where we least expect God to be: the places of evil, suffering, misery and death. 

 

We Christians have “known” this for centuries, but it remains deeply counter-intuitive, as it has from the very beginning.  Noted author Fred Craddock has written, "All the way to the cross Jesus kept trying to get people who believed [that], 'Where the Messiah is, there is no misery’  to see a new perspective, "Where there is misery, there is the Messiah.'" [1] "Where there is misery, there is the Messiah.'"

 

Before this last week of his life, Jesus tried to get this point through his disciples’ thick skulls, with little success.   When he first told them of his coming suffering, Peter was indignant:  “God forbid, Lord! This will never happen to you!”  But, thank God, Peter, it did.  Thank God, it did. 

 

And because it did, Christians have turned to texts like Isaiah 53 to give words to this counter-intuitive truth:  Surely, he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.  Surely, he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.  In our griefs and sorrows, the suffering, dying man on the Cross is where God is today. 

 

And not just in some holy memory recalled on Good Friday – but in every place of evil, suffering, misery and death here in our world today.   We look back over nearly 2,000 years to an execution in a different world, a different age and a different culture, so it often seems that Jesus’ death happened very long ago and very far away.  That may be true as a matter of history.  But it is profoundly untrue as a matter of life.  Jesus’ death is here and now; the Cross is here and now; God is here and now--  in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Chile and Africa; in inner cities and bankrupt neighborhoods, in troubled homes, suffering children, sick rooms and on death beds.

 

Where is God today?  In these and every other place of evil, suffering, misery and death in our world. 

 

It takes a lifetime of awareness to know that what is standing before you is God… 

God shows up all the time.  God comes to us all the time.  God is present all the time.  God is incarnated in every fiber of life…Yet most human beings do not recognize that the earth, that life, is filled with the presence of God.  It takes a lifetime of awareness to know that what is standing before you is God.  [2]  So said preacher Mark Bozzuti-Jones in words that have stayed with me since I first heard them. 

 

Knowing that God is standing before us, hanging before us, in places of evil, suffering, misery and death is perhaps the hardest awareness of God for us to get.  This awareness of God is counter-intuitive; it is not what we expect nor, perhaps, what we want.  "Where there is misery, there is the Messiah.'" [3]  But it is crucial that we grasp this awareness -- or that it grasp us –  for in this awareness we will find life, hope and above all, love.

 

For it is Love that draws God to come to the places of our misery; Love that makes God bear our griefs and carry our sorrows; Love that compels God to suffer our death.  And in its odd way, that makes some sense out of this counter-intuitive truth.  For love itself is counter-intuitive, or at the least, paradoxical.  God’s love works in ways this world doesn’t expect --  most of all on the Cross we venerate tonight. 

 

That paradox of God’s love on the Cross is in the words of a hymn I have grown to love:

 

 Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Love that gives, gives ever more,
gives with zeal, with eager hands,
spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
ventures all, its all expends.

Drained is love in making full,
bound in setting others free,
poor in making many rich,
weak in giving power to be.

Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree;
and the nails and crown of thorns
tell of what God’s love must be.

 

Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain. [4]

 

Where is God today?

Here, on the Cross, and in our world, is God;

 

Here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.

 

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

Good Friday, 2010