A sermon for Good Friday
April 18, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR
Readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:12, Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9, John 18:1-19:42
Mary’s room was dark, like a tomb, there at the end of the nursing home hallway. At 97, it had been her home for 20 years. She had called for Communion and a pastoral visit because she was Episcopalian when she was a child and she always liked Episcopal priests. Mary’s room wasn’t only dark because she kept the lights off and curtains drawn, closed off to the world. It was also dark because she was lonely, desperately lonely; she was depressed, terribly depressed. At the end of her life, she was looking back and didn’t know what it was for. She carried regret. She carried hatred and anger. She carried shame.
Today we stand in the shadow of Christ’s cross. On the cross we see the Son of God, hanging like a scarecrow, pinned up by the sin of the world. It’s a familiar image. Too familiar. We wear it around our necks, clad with fine stones and metals. We see it on the side of the highway, lit up to drive away darkness. Even here, in this room, we see the cross repeated. Most of the crosses have been taken out today as the church is stripped of its ornaments and finery. But in a few moments we will see a rude cross in our midst, unadorned, and in that we will see beauty.
The cross, too, was a familiar image to those living in Jesus’s place and time, but it was the stuff of nightmares, not decoration. Crucifixion was a favorite execution method of the Romans, and it was reserved for the lowest of the low. It discouraged dissent, terrified the unsatisfied who might yearn for more, kept the rebels in their place. The Romans crucified thousands at a time; they lined roadways with crosses. Sometimes you were crucified because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time—no trial, no recognizable due process. At least Jesus gets a trial, even if it is more of a kangaroo court. The cross is the punishment of the slave, a death fit for beasts in the Roman mind. Jesus does not endure just any death; he endures the most cursed of deaths.
When I visited her in her nursing home room, I noticed Mary had a cross hanging on the wall. I noticed it because it was not like the crosses I typically see. It was not pretty. It looked like two sticks she had put together with cheap putty. I asked her about it. She had made it, she said. She didn’t know why. But she had made it so she hung it on her wall. It was the only wall decoration she had. Why was it special? I asked her. “It’s not,” she said, rather coldly. “I don’t understand the cross. Why did Jesus have to die on the cross?” That was her question that day.
Here’s what I told her: In order to redeem all things, Christ had to share in all things. Christ had to share, not only in every joy, but also every pain, every suffering, every shame. Christ does that as he hangs naked on the tree as a warning to the world. Christ not only shares in the goodness of humanity; he not only shares in the banality of the human condition; he also descends into our deepest, most cursed, most shameful histories. He takes it all upon himself, the depth of every curse, the depravity of every sin, the death of every creature–he takes it all upon himself in order to redeem it all. Nothing could be held back from God. Christ bore it all; he paid it all; all so he could ransom all. And so we call this terrible day good.
“Father,” Mary asked, “Do you think Jesus could have come off the cross?” I told her what I thought–what I think still: No. She was surprised, because she had heard a different answer. Maybe you have, too. “What do you mean?” she asked, a little bothered. I told her. If the question is whether Jesus had the ability to come off the cross, that is a different question. Could he have called legions of angels down? Sure. Mary and I both agreed we would have done that. But Mary’s question was different. It was not about Jesus’s ability, but about his character. For what keeps Jesus on the cross is love: love for us, love for the whole universe. Love keeps him there, and through that love sin and death are once and for all defeated: It is finished, just as he said. Love is at the heart of the character of God. If Jesus had chosen to come off the cross, I don’t think we could say that. So, no, Jesus couldn’t come off the cross because that’s not who he is. Love held him there, as surely as love holds the universe together.
Mary and I spent a few minutes looking at that odd looking cross in her room. You and I will spend some time gazing on a cross placed in our midst in just a few moments’ time. It’s a picture of love, those rude and ugly crosses. It’s a picture of the love of God who spared nothing, who held back nothing, who went to every length to claim us, to save us, to call us his own; who purchased us with everything: the very blood of God.
Mary still wasn’t sure it was enough. She had hurt people, she said. She had turned on friends. She had abandoned family. She told me over and over again that I didn’t know how mean she could be. She regretted that. It was a defense mechanism, I learned. Abandoned by her parents as a baby; passed around from family member to family member; abused and injured by those she loved the most; rejected and despised by acquaintances and strangers alike, cruelty was all she knew. Life had passed her by, and it seemed plain mean for her to make it to 97 all alone. She had never been married; never asked on a date; never had a child. She had wanted to be a wife and mother more than anything else. She wept in that room. She wept at the tomb of her life–she, one of the living dead. I remembered the Bible verse: “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.”
Christ died for Mary and her sorrow, her sin. He died for you and for me, for our human condition, our sin. He died for all. He didn’t die for the best parts of us. He died for the parts of us that no one sees; the parts of us we hide away; the parts that come out in nightmares and at our worst moments. He died to open up new worlds. Through the tearing of his flesh, the hostility that divides us, the shame that captures us, the pain that seeks to define us, the sin that clings so closely, the death that lurks–through the tearing of his flesh on the cross all of that is reconciled to God. It is affixed to God’s very Self with cruel Roman nails. And once affixed, he knows it all. He bears it all. He redeems it all. All so we can call him Savior, Lord, friend.
Mary had told herself a story for decades. A story that led her to hurt others, to disregard herself, to disengage from the world. The cross stands in the middle of that story. The cross stands as a sign that her story and all the stories we tell ourselves have a new ending, because God has come into our lives, even into the parts only we can see. All for love. All to bring us out of death and to himself. All to cover our sin and claim us for heaven. And that is very good.
Storied Grace 