ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Good Friday, 2007
Fr Alan Moses
Hymn 439 Praise to the Holiest in the height"
O Lord Jesus Christ, who from out your silence upon the Cross gave your Church Seven Words; grant that we may ponder them as the inexhaustible Gospel of your love and of the world's redemption; and learn likewise both by speech and silence to glorify our Father in heaven; who with you and the Holy Spirit is alive and reigns, one God, world without end. Amen.
1. "MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?"
On Monday we began our meditation on the Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross. These words have been a traditional subject for the Three Hours's Devotion on Good Friday. Now that we incorporate the Liturgy of the Passion in our Three Hours, there is not room for all of them, so we have spread them over the week with Fr. Aquilina preaching on the first three from Monday to Wednesday.
Today we look at the remaining four. One thing we need to remember is that the words come from different gospels, different accounts of the passion, so they reflect something of the different standpoints, the theological insights and purposes of the different evangelists. It is as if we are allowed to look at different facets of a precious stone.
This fourth word "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" comes from St. Mark's Gospel, the first to be written (and is found also in St. Matthew who follows Mark very closely. In Mark it is not only our Lord's last word from the cross, it is his only word. So when we hear Mark read, we hear this great cry of dereliction, with its sense of abandonment by God is shouted out into the darkness which envelopes the scene, in all its starkness. We should not succumb to the temptation to blunt that shock. Here is Jesus, the one we think of as being so close to God, speaking, shouting out, that he experiences God as absent, he feels abandoned.
This last word is a cry which has struck a chord, I think, in our era with its litany of horrors; of world wars and genocide and gulags. Where is God in all this; in Auschwitz and Cambodia, where is he in Rwanda and Darfur and Iraq? This is a question which any soul not hardened into insensitivity must ask. Where too is God in the more private tragedies which many of us encounter at some stage of our life - of illness, loss and disappointment ? These are things which make us question our faith. And so they should, otherwise our faith is likely to be superficial and easy, a matter of glib platitudes which will not stand the test.
We need as Christians to take seriously why serious people do sometimes find it hard to believe. There are moral reasons for not believing and much superficial religion merely reinforces them, gives them added weight, by not taking this moral wrestling seriously enough.
Mark's Gospel, his treatment of the Passion and Resurrection, does not trivialise the darkness. There is no quick fix solution to all of life's problems. He would be no good as a prosperity cult TV evangelist promising that God will give you a Mercedes if you ask for it the right way. He shows us Jesus sharing in the depths of human life and death, not just in the physical state of torture and death but in the psychological state too - that sense of abandonment by God which physical and mental suffering brings, as victims of torture testify.
There is a story told by the Jewish writer Elie Wiesel about an execution in a concentration camp. Two men and a young boy are being hanged and the rest of the inmates are paraded to watch. Someone asks where God is in all this. Someone else says: "Hanging there." What the cross and that word of dereliction from the cross says to us again and again , and never often enough, is that God is there with us in the worst agony and desolation.
In a positive sense it speaks to us of a God who is indeed "with us" in the worst of our world - in that sense of the absence of God, the death of hope, which is part of human suffering - at the hands of others.
There has perhaps been a tendency to make it almost a motto for unbelief , an atheist, or at least an agnostic slogan. "You see, even Jesus gave up believing in the end!"
What else can we say about this cry? Well, it is addressed to God - not to Father - as Jesus normally addressed God in prayer - as we heard in his first word from the cross and we will hear again in the last. It is as if Jesus is entering into the situation of a humanity which does not know God as Father, but as impersonal deity. The incarnation being lived out. The harrowing of hell.
Well, there's more to it than that. Jesus' cry is of course a quotation from Psalm 22 which we recited at the Stripping of the Altar at the end of Mass last night, and which we will sing during the liturgy today.
The psalm which goes on the proclaim God's help and support in time of trial. Did Jesus intend us to see the cry in that context. We do not know? And we should beware of easy answers. Mark's Gospel, especially his passion and resurrection narratives are an antidote to quick-fix glib religion. The picture is not entirely dark - not as dark as some would have us believe - there is the profession of faith by the centurion and the women who have stood by the cross and go to the tomb - even if the disciples have hidden.
But it is still a prayer, an act of defiant faith, of belief even when belief is well nigh impossible. It is important for us to remember that. There may come a time when we will have to cling on to that truth, it may be the only thing we have left to cling on to.
Much of what we hear about prayer and spirituality these days seems to see it as a technique for inducing calm and serenity. There is truth in that - meditation does often have that effect. But the prayer of Jesus includes more than quiet retreats. It involves wrestling with the temptation in the desert and on the night before his death in the Garden of Gethsemane. Even in St. John's Gospel, often seen as somehow mystical and above it all, Jesus prays in the Upper Room; " Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I pray, Father save me from this hour."
Even on the cross Jesus revealed himself as a teacher of prayer. Matthew and Mark record our Lord's tortured address to the God who seems utterly gone. This cry, both anguished and faithful serves to remind us of Jesus; true humanity, for he really felt God's absence as he prayed. But he did pray, which means that his words can encourage us to reach out for the distant God from the worst of our personal situations. Prayer is not just for those occasions when we feel religious, pious, good about things. It is when we feel like hell. It was for Jesus and because is was it is for us.
Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, who for us endured the horror of deep darkness: teach us by the depth of your agony the vileness of our sin, and so bind to yourself in bonds of gratitude and love, that we may be united with you in your perfect sacrifice; our Saviour, our Lord and our God. Amen. William Temple
Hymn 90 O Sacred head, sore wounded
2. "I THIRST"
At one level Jesus' thirst witnesses to the pain and suffering that accompanies his death by crucifixion. At the human level, Jesus' request for a drink is immediately understandable, The torture he had undergone, the loss of blood, the exertion, must have taken a considerable toll. We are largely made up of water and as soon as we stop drinking we begin to wither away; to die. You and I barely notice this most of the time because water is so easily accessible to us , even on the hottest of days. Perhaps during Lent we should borrow the Muslim custom of not drinking throughout the day in the season of Ramadan. After all they borrowed the custom from Syrian Christians in the first place.
So we could see this simply as one more entry in the gruesome catalogue of cruelties inflicted on Jesus. This is often what preachers and Christian devotion have done.
It was one of the hallmarks of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion" that it dwelt on the physical torture, in a pornography of violence. But the gospel accounts are in fact quite reticent about the details of the crucifixion. This is particularly true of St. John.
It is in the nature of St. John's Gospel that nothing is ever simply what it seems on the surface. So to have Jesus say "I thirst" - echoing the psalmist in Psalm 69 - one of the psalms which the church quickly came to associate with the passion, - means more than mere physical thirst. That physical thirst is real and it witnesses to the reality of Christ's humanity; to the incarnation. This is not ethereal, spiritual figure untouched by human life and suffering.
But that need for water simply to sustain physical life, because without it creatures who are largely made up of it quickly wither and die, stands for another life - that offered to us by Christ, and without which we wither and die.
Jesus' "I thirst" recalls his question to Peter at the arrest, "Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?" 18.11
Jesus' thirst symbolises his willingness to embrace death and the offer of sour wine takes on an ironic note as one more example of the world's misunderstanding of him. Jesus thirsts for God's cup and is offered sour wine. There may also be a related ironic contrast between the "good wine" at Cana through which Jesus revealed his glory, and the sour wine that he receives at his glorification.
Early in the gospel too, Jesus had come Jacob's well in Samaria. In the heat of the noonday, he asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water. There ensues a dialogue in which he speaks of himself as the one who gives living water: "Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give...will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." John 4.10, 13-14
And then in the Temple on the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, "If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, 'Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water". John 7.37-38.
Throughout the incarnate life which begins with him seeking a drink from the breast of his mother and ends with him crying in thirst on the cross, throughout it all he thirsts for God's people, to bring them into relationship with God, a relationship in which they will find the spring of water welling up to eternal life.
"This he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified." John 7.39
From his side pierced on the cross, there will flow blood and water - the sacraments of the eucharist and baptism. The church which begins in embryo in St. John in the community of his mother and beloved disciple entrusted to one another's care, will draw its life from that stream. But that church is also called to share in Christ's thirst for his brothers and sisters to share in his life. How often are we content to share to drink from his well yet forget that we are to thirst for others, that we are to drink Christ's cup, that we are to be wells of living waters for others, so that they may drink his living water and enjoy the best wine of the wedding feast.
Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who at the sixth hour with great turmoil went up to the cross of pain on Golgotha, and, thirsting for our salvation, accepted th sponge of vinegar; kindle in our hearts the burning love of your passion, and let us continually find our delight in you alone, our crucified Lord. Amen.
Hymn 357 "Father, hear the prayer we offer"
3. "IT IS FINISHED"
When we hear it in the English of the Authorised Version, this can seem to sound a note of weary resignation - an ordeal is over, some weary and unpleasant task has been completed. This might indeed seem the case when we think of a man suffering on the cross. There comes a time when people who have endured long suffering, terminal illness say, or even just old age and frailty, the loneliness of widowhood, let alone the torture of crucifixion, when they really can't face any more of it and just want to be away. Death seems a welcome release.
But that it is not the note sounded by this word in St. John's Passion. The Greek word is tetelestai - consummatum est in Latin - which helps us to see that it means not simply an end, a termination of something unpleasant, a welcome release from something which has gone disastrously wrong; but something achieved, a work finished and perfected, something consummated.
"After this, Jesus, knowing that all was finished." With the final fulfillment of scripture accomplished in the offer of the sour wine, Jesus himself announces what the narrator signalled in verse 28 "It is finished".
Jesus' death is not a moment of defeat or despair, but a moment of confidence in the completion of God's work in the world: In his priestly prayer in the Upper Room on the night before his death Jesus prays to the Father:
"I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the work which thou gavest me to do; and now Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which had with thee before the world was made." 17.4
Those of you who were here for the Mass of the Lord's Supper last night will recall Fr. Gaskell speaking of Stanley Spencer's painting of the Last Supper, and of his portrayal of Jesus with great workman's hands. Jesus had been a workman, a carpenter, for most of his life. In Joseph's workshop he had learned to use those hands to fashion things from wood; to bring designs to perfection for their purpose. Now he is working with wood again, the wood of the cross, to bring another creation to perfection.
The Bible begins with God's work in creation in the book of Genesis. John begins his Gospel with "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men."
The Father had worked in creation and the beginning of St. John's Gospel speaks in fact of a new creation in Jesus Christ. Creation has an end, creation is to be consummated, and the name of that end and consummation is Jesus Christ.
Jesus speaks of the work he must do. That work is the breaking down of the boundaries between God and us. It is the remaking of humanity in the perfection for which it was intended but which has been marred and disfigured by our sin. It is the recapitulation, a refashioning of all humanity in Jesus Christ so that he can be the source of new life in all who are drawn to his cross.
Preachers tend to concentrate on sin on this day, but it is important that we remember St. John's particular emphasis on the glory of the cross. It is in the cross we see the beauty of God; the beauty of humankind made in the image of God, because we see there the perfection of love.
This helps us to see the work of creation and recreation in the light of its end, its ultimate goal. It ends in joy. We usually speak of consummation in connection with marriage and Jesus uses the marriage feast as a symbol of the kingdom of God. That consummation is made possible by God's love, by God's friendship with us. In Jesus on the cross we see God's unrelenting love for his creation.
Jesus is the one who recapitulates all that God has done on our behalf until the final consummation. But this means that in Christ that recapitulation, that remaking, continues in the world. We, the body of Christ, through the Spirit, turn out to be "the finished". God became human so that we might become divine. So Jesus work is "finished but not over". God remains at work making us his creatures divine.
It is not that the work is entirely complete - clearly that is not yet so, but the beginning of it is complete - that life which is now made available from the cross through the sacraments - the water and the blood which flow from the pierced side of Jesus, to animate that new community, the new humanity formed by entrusting his mother to the beloved disciple as the embryonic church which is the forerunner of a renewed humanity.
It is the task of revealing the nature and purpose of God in the world which has been completed in the passion of Jesus. That work is both God's and ours.
Prayer:
Lord God, when you call your servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same, until it be thoroughly finished, which yields the true glory; through him who, for the finishing of your work, laid down his life for us, our Redeemer Jesus Christ.
after Sir. Francis Drake.
Hymn 380 "It is finished! Christ hath known"
4 FATHER, INTO THY HANDS I COMMEND MY SPIRIT
In our sermons this week we have been looking at the 7 Words from the Cross.
Let me remind you of them in case you have just arrived.
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
"Today, you will be with me in paradise"
"Woman, behold, your son. Son, behold your mother."
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me."
"I thirst".
"It is finished."
"Father, into you hands, I commend my spirit."
Like the first, it comes from St. Luke, and like the first, it is a prayer addressed to the Father; this time a prayer of committal into the hands of the Father.
Some of you will remember that at the beginning of the week, Fr. Aquilina asked us to think of all the Words as a single prayer. It is one of the characteristics of Luke's Gospel to show us Jesus as a man of prayer, in relationship with the Father through that prayer, and as a teacher of prayer, both by word and example. Prayer marks all the significant moments and actions of his ministry. Now it marks it to the end.
Luke adds significantly to our picture of Jesus' need for conversation with God, especially in moments of great transition, and there is no greater transition than this. Only he tells us that Jesus was praying immediately before his baptism. It was then that he saw the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove and heard God's sovereign assurance "Thou art my beloved Son". Luke also notes that Jesus spent an entire night in prayer before choosing his 12 closest disciples from a large group of followers. and that he was praying on the mountain before his Transfiguration.
Prayer has been the leitmotif of Jesus' ministry, most recently on the Mount of Olives the night before he died and in his prayer for forgiveness for those who "know not what they do". Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell of Jesus' private struggle with God in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his arrest. John, while noting Jesus' troubled state, emphasizes his prayerful conformation to the divine will:
"Now is my soul troubled. And what shall, I say? Father, save me from this hour? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name." 12.27-28
True to form, Luke adds to our knowledge of Jesus' praying even at the hour of his death. He knows of a tradition that Jesus finally experienced such inner peace in his dying that he could intercede for his executioners and yield up his last breath in total confidence. We do not know how all of Luke's special information on Jesus' prayer life found its way into the Gospel, although he does tell us in his prologue that he has gained accesses to reports from eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.
Jesus the risen Christ is our priest as well as our teacher. He comes to us through the Gospels, he lives in our minds and our hearts, he intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father, his Spirit prays in us "with sighs too deep for words", so that wherever we are, spiritually or emotionally, we too may approach the throne of grace, offering our petitions and praises with his help. We have a high priest who is able to sympathise with us in our weakness. For those who pray or want to pray in Jesus' name, the study of his teachings is nothing less than a step into fuller communion with him and his ongoing mission of redemption.
Luke does not include in his crucifixion account the darkest moment of Jesus' suffering in the experience of being forsaken by God. Jesus' awareness of the real absence of God is not mentioned. Rather than Psalm 22, Luke takes our Lord's final prayer from Psalm 31.6, which formed part of the night prayer of the pious Jew who entrusted himself into the care of God before his appointment with sleep. This is another psalm which portrays the rejection of the righteous one by adversaries but also breathes throughout a quiet confidence in God's saving power. "Hands" = power in the verse Jesus quotes. Where the psalmist entrusts himself to God in the context of life, Jesus entrusts himself to God in the face of death. This is a custom taken over by the Church for we do the same in the night office of Compline, before the sleep which is a symbol of death: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."
"When he had said this, he died."
"he expired"
With these words of commitment on his lips, Jesus breathes his last. Jesus uses this prayer, addressing it to his Father: in a final act of conscious commitment Jesus entrusts his whole life to the care of the Father before his appointment with death. This Jesus finishes his life dying to do the will of the Father, and only when he has prayerfully put himself in the presence of his Father does he breathe his last. Handed over "into the hands of men", Jesus now commends himself into the hands of God. Fittingly in Luke, Jesus does not die with a cry of abandon but with full confidence in the One whom he addressed as Father.
In his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, Luke will show us Jesus' serenity in the face of death becoming the model for Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who at his death sees heaven opened and Jesus at the right hand of the Father. He too prays for the forgiveness of his enemies and dies saying, "Lord Jesus receive my spirit."
It has been the pattern for Christians ever since, whether in martyrdom or simply facing death in old age and sickness. Faithful Christians have said their "Nunc Dimittis" and commended their souls into the hands of God.
And we pray for our dying ones:
"Unto thee, O Lord, we commend the soul of thy servant, that dying to the world, he may live to thee..."
Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who at the ninth hour, with outstretched hands and bowed head commended your spirit to God the Father, and by your death unlocked the gates of paradise; grant that in the hour of our death we may come to you, the true paradise,
for ever and ever. Amen.