A sermon for Good Friday
April 3, 2026, 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; Psalm 22
There may not have been a worse place than Marine Outpost Con Thien during the Vietnam conflict. Soldiers sent there, soldiers like Scott Harrison, described it as a death sentence. Scott said that it felt like “a matter of time,” a matter of time before being wounded, before being killed. Scott was 19 years old–far too young to find yourself in hell. He was there for a year. I told you about Scott and his Carousel of Happiness with hand-crafted wooden animals and whimsical music and mountain views and flowery meadows in Colorado yesterday evening. But before the Carousel and its happy visions, there was a battlefield, and death, and the smell of flesh, and a small music box. Before the Carousel in a mountain meadow there was the place of a skull, Golgotha, Calvary, outside the city walls of humankind.
We gather today to hear the story we know well. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is arrested, condemned, tried, and crucified. He is flogged; he carries his cross up a hill outside the city walls, he is nailed there like a scarecrow, shamed, humiliated, tortured, killed. Theologian Fleming Rutledge calls this the most irreligious of acts. It offends our polite, religious sensibilities, our parlor room conversations about the Divine. We imagine God so differently. So perhaps it’s no surprise that when he comes among us, we kill him. He does not save himself–though he could have. Instead he bears the suffering, the sin, the shame. He hangs there naked as a warning to the world, and the forces of Evil think they have won.
Let us be clear on this day: We did this. Our sin nails him there. The human condition and our hostility to God and the things of God are what make God die for us. Nothing less than that would do. In order to heal us, to redeem us, to reconcile us, God could do nothing less than take all sin, all shame, all sorrow, all death upon himself. We did this, just as surely as we sent Scott Harrison to that battlefield, just as surely as our sin rains down hellfire time and time and time again.
The cross of Christ is found not only on that hill far away outside the city; the cross of Christ is found in every place where sin causes suffering and pain, where evil corrupts the creatures of God. The cross of Christ is found in every place where the innocent bystanders, caught in the cyclone of political and military intrigue, are sent to their deaths, and they say under their breath, “it’s just a matter of time.” The cross of Christ was found at Marine Outpost Con Thien, and at Gettysburg, and on the beaches of Normandy and at the Battle of the Bulge, and at a hospital in Gaza, and an apartment complex in Kiev, and a girls’ school in Iran. The cross of Christ is found there, for God in the flesh does not turn away from the suffering and sorrowful; God in the flesh does not forsake the dying and the wounded and the fearful; God in the flesh does not abandon the besieged. God in the flesh picks up his cross, and goes into the heart of suffering, the heart of sin, the heart of pain, the heart of death. He takes it all upon himself to heal it; to give us a way out; to bring peace through the curtain of his flesh; to declare, once for all, that sin and death will not reign over the world, but only the goodness and love of God. And through his sacrifice all those who believe in him do not perish, but are granted eternal life. “It is finished.”
There, on the Calvary at Marine Outpost Con Thien, Scott Harrison would shake with fear, quaking like the ground when Christ dies. A death sentence, a “matter of time.” And Scott would hold a small music box to his ear. His sister had sent it to him. It played Chopin’s Tristesse. He would hold it to his ear and imagine himself somewhere else, in a flowery meadow between the mountains, the very opposite of the place where people were trying to kill each other to survive. He would weep.
He was wounded and evacuated in 1968. But his battle wasn’t over. He was plagued with PTSD and alcoholism. For many–for many a veteran, it’s a death sentence, a “matter of time.” But again, the music box against the ear, imagining a flowery meadow between the mountains. He would weep.
Our Lord saw his weeping. From his own cross, from his own place of suffering, he saw the battles waged within Scott Harrison. And as Christ died, I believe he saw Scott, and you, and me, and every child of earth who is plagued by suffering and pain on the battlefield of sin and death. He saw each of us, and with his blood, he wrote our names, and he accomplished all that was necessary to heal us, to redeem us, to bring us back into God’s grace and love. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life. And so we call today good.
Scott held the music box to his ear, and medics and chaplains have said quiet words with bombs exploding around, and we have hummed ourselves to sleep through tears, and countless parents have rocked their sick children with a lullaby, and children have sung quietly and held the hand of their dying parent as she takes her final breath. And maybe Mary, there at the foot of the cross, sang a comforting song to her dying son, gasping for air and in shock. An old song, the song she once sang with Christ in her womb, although now she sings with greater understanding: My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. Is this, she wonders–is this suffering on the tree, what that means? Yes, this is what it must mean for God to have favor on his lowly servants, on Mary and Scott and all of us.
Our Lord has looked with favor on us, on every battlefield and place of suffering, on every grief borne and indignity endured–he has looked with favor on all of creation from the throne of his cross, as sorrow and blood flow mingled down. Though we, through our sin, have done this to him, he has done this all for us. It’s all for us.
Storied Grace 