Good Friday 2004

Fr. Dan Weir preached this sermon on Good Friday, April 9, 2004.

"My kingdom does not belong to this world. If it did, my followers would be fighting to keep me from arrest by the Jews. My kingly authority comes from elsewhere." "You are a king, then?" said Pilate. Jesus answered, "'King' is your word. My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this I was born; for this I came into the world, and all who are not deaf to truth listen to my voice." (John 18:36-37)

In the midst of all the interest that has been generated by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, we would be wise to place the Passion in its proper context, and not to see it isolated from the life and ministry of Jesus. Jesus died because of who he was and what he did and said in the years leading up to his final confrontation with the political and religious leaders of his day. Jesus came to proclaim - to live out - the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom that does not belong to this world.

The Church has for centuries avoided what I take to be the clear meaning of this passage from John's account of the Passion, avoided it, for the most part by translating Jesus' reply to Pilate as, "my kingdom is not of this world," implying for some Christians, at least, that Jesus' authority is not for this world but for the next.  But the clear sense of the sentence in Greek, whether you translate the preposition as "of" or "from," is that Jesus' kingdom does not have its origins in this world, i.e., in the principles upon which the institutions of this world are based, rather than in this world in a physical sense, or even in this world in the sense of its people.  Jesus' implicit rejection of the world in this exchange with the Roman governor, is not a rejection of the world's human inhabitants, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." (John 3:16)  Nor is it a rejection of the world as the arena for the exercise of his authority, "My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this I was born; for this I came into the world,  and all who are not deaf to truth listen to my voice " (John 18:37)  As he stands before Pilate, Jesus rejects the principles of this fallen world, rejects the system of domination by which Pilate and the Roman Empire operated.

And in place of those principles of control and domination of others, Jesus demonstrates in his Passion what I would identify as four principles of life in the Reign of God.  These are not the only principles of life in the kingdom that one can find in the scriptures; they are simply four which I discern in reading John's account of Jesus' Passion.

First of all Jesus was not dominated by fear.  In the conversations between Jesus and Pilate, it was Pilate who, in spite of all the power at his disposal, was controlled by his fears.  Fearful of the crowds and of the possibility of a negative report being sent to Rome, fearful most of all of failing, Pilate went against what appears to have been his own best judgement and condemned Jesus to death.  Jesus, faced with the prospect of imminent death, did not cringe and beg for mercy, any more than he had availed himself of the opportunity to flee Jerusalem in the days preceding his arrest.  He was, quite simply, free, not dominated by any of the very natural fears that he may have experienced.  He was free because his life was grounded in his unshakable trust in the One whom he called Abba, Father.  He knew what the Apostle Paul would later affirm in writing to the Church in the capital city of the empire: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God...." (Romans 8:38-39)  Life in the new order that Jesus called the Kingdom or Reign of God is life grounded in an unshakable relationship with God.  With that kind of foundation, we can face the world's hostility without being dominated by fear.

A second principle of life in the Reign of God can be see in Jesus' words to his mother and the disciple whom he loved: "Jesus saw his mother, with the disciple whom he loved standing beside her. He said to her, 'Mother, there is your son.' And to the disciple, he said, 'There is your mother.' And from that moment the disciple took her into his own home." (John 19:26-27) To be living in the kingdom is to be living in new and deeper relationships with others.  Even as death approached, Jesus focused his attention on two of the most important people in his life and made clear that as they had loved and been loved by him, now they are bound in love to one another.  And it was not to end with them. The Christian life is life in community, a life lived at such depth that one can easily look at one's fellow Christians and see them as sisters and brothers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters.

A third principle of new life in Christ can be seen in Jesus' words, "I thirst." (John 19:28)  What I hear in these words of Jesus is a recognition of his own neediness, a recognition that the Word, who was in "the beginning...with God, and...was God" (John 1:1), that the Word, in taking human flesh became needy.  God, who needs nothing, in becoming human has chosen to be needy, and, in a sense to embrace that neediness, to affirm it as something good.  Contrast that to the unwillingness of many of us, needy as we are, to admit it.  Most of us try to hide our neediness, at least some of the time, even from those closest to us.  Self-sufficiency and independence are seen as virtues, and some people, in struggling to maintain a facade of independence, would sooner die than admit a need or ask for help. Life in Christ requires our honesty in making our needs known, not only to God, but to one another.

Finally, life in the Kingdom is life with a purpose.  At the last moment of his life, Jesus said, "It is accomplished." (John 19:30)  Jesus had at last accomplished that for which he had come into the world, he had by his life and death testified to the truth of God's love for humankind.  That, I believe, is our purpose in life as well.  We are called in Christ so to live - and die - that the world may see and know God's love.

We have been called to live in the Reign of God, in a kingdom that is not from this world and is not shaped by this world's values.  But God has not called us to retreat from the world, but rather to live in it with freedom and a great boldness and by our living to share in the world's transformation.  The Cross is the sign of the struggle to establish God's reign in human history and the sign of God's victory.  But the victory which Christ won upon the Cross is yet to be fully realized, and we have been called and given the great privilege of sharing in that realization.  And so we must work and pray for that day when "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever." (Revelation 11:15)