Good Friday, Year C

The Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew

April 6, 2007

Long before we came up with the concept of cultivating a multimedia approach to communication, God created pathways to understanding the truth that are multilayered, multivalent, and multidimensional. God shows us the truth where we are, at whatever level we can begin to see and understand, and stretches us from there to widen our comprehension, like following the pattern of ripples expanding in a pond after a stone has been dropped in the center.

In today’s reading from Isaiah God begins with having the prophet articulate a call to joy and celebration even while describing in excruciating detail the suffering of God’s servant. For us the combination is counterintuitive. Who celebrates suffering? Where is the good news, the saving power, of an innocent servant suffering both for and because of others? This idea was first introduced in the concept of sacrifice, of having an innocent animal become the symbol for human sin, and through offering that animal to God to seek healing of the brokenness in our relationship with God and others. The good news was not in the suffering, but in the opening of a way back to right relationship with God and each other. In today’s reading Isaiah offers a way to stretch that understanding, as the Israelites who have lived in exile are portrayed as the ones who have suffered on behalf of all people, and through their suffering God has opened a new way to restored relationship with God. The symbol of this restoration is the invitation to return to Jerusalem, to once again take up residence in the literal Promised Land, to live into the covenant. The idea of a group of people becoming the ones suffering on behalf of others was a radical notion, a new and bold step out into grasping God’s truth.

Again today we read this same text from Isaiah and, as Christians, see a new and wider ripple in the pond. This suffering servant is not only an animal sacrificed both by and for us to restore us to right relationship, nor is the servant simply the suffering community of Israelite exiles called back home into restored life in the Promised Land, though both of those things are true. The ring of truth that stands clear before us is that Jesus is The Suffering Servant, the one who in the fullness of the concept of sacrifice offered himself to redeem us. Why it is that suffering is a part of the process of redemption is difficult for us to understand, but for whatever reason that it is, God thought it well worth going through personally for our benefit. In Jesus God was fully engaged in the realities of human life, suffering and death, thereby stretching our understanding of what it is to live a holy life in both its specificity and its ordinariness. As Dorothy Sayers so forthrightly put it:

…for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair…He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

From the time humans first broke trust with their Creator, God has created ways for us to grasp the truth of God’s love for us and to find our way back to trust. Through covenants with Noah and Abraham, through the Exodus of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and the covenant established with God’s people on Mt. Sinai, through kings and prophets, exile and return, God has reached out to us again and again. The art of ‘overcommunicating’ originated here. Finally, God came to us in the person of Jesus, to continue stretching our understanding of just how much God loves us and to create a new pathway into restored relationship. Once again God began with what God’s people already knew, and in the Gospel according to John today we hear God’s reminders again and again, calling us to recognize the story of God’s saving love and to see it enacted one more time on an even more profound level.

When those who come to arrest Jesus seek to identify him, Jesus identifies himself, saying “Ego eimi,” the “I AM” of the burning bush, God’s self-identification to Moses. No wonder they stepped back and fell to the ground. When Jesus was taken to Pilate’s headquarters those who escorted him “did not enter…so as to avoid ritual defilement and be able to eat the Passover.” It is the time of the Passover, the remembrance of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, the night when the sacrificial lamb was to be offered. By its blood the Hebrew people would be spared the final plague; when the angel of death would claim all the firstborn it would “passover” them. Here stands Jesus, the new sacrificial lamb, the one whose blood would save God’s people from the power of death. And there, choreographed for all to see, is Jesus on one side, those who oppose Jesus on the other, and Pilate shuttling back and forth. As we watch the drama unfold the implicit question becomes this: “Where are we?” Are we, like those who opposed Jesus, bound by our limited understanding of who God is and how God operates? Are we able to look at the warnings of rejection and suffering that lie ahead and accept Jesus? Or are we, like Pilate, full of questions and uncertainties, hearing both sides and wondering “What is truth?”

The drama is full of irony, one of the ways John points to layers of meaning throughout his text. Pilate claims to have power, which is true. Yet Jesus cites God as the ultimate source of power. Pilate is the only one to label Jesus King of the Jews, and he is right. Those who wish to crucify Jesus claim “We have no king but the emperor,” missing both the fact that their statement is a rejection of God and a failure to see that Jesus is God. In the end, what is left is that all of our rationalizations, defenses, excuses, fears and issues come to the fore when we face Jesus, just as they did. The final layer of irony beyond the text is that we can miss the point just as surely as our predecessors. When we meditate today on this one man, Jesus, who suffered and died for us, what we have is a choice. We can open our hearts to God, who would endure a kind of suffering we can scarcely comprehend so that we can know God’s love in a new and life changing way. Or not.