GOOD FRIDAY 2009
The Revd Canon Daniel S. Weir preached this sermon at the Good Friday Liturgy on April 10, 2009.
It is finished.
Like so many other verses in Scripture, this one has a wonderful ambiguity about it.
On the one hand there is the possibility of hearing it as a shout of triumph – IT IS FINISHED!!! – the triumph of one who has accomplished a long sought after goal, who has completed an arduous and very important task.
But on the other, we might hear this as a statement of resignation, even defeat – it is finished - the statement of one who has poured everything into a job, a relationship, life and is completely worn out, unable to go on, finished.
From the world’s perspective, this latter way of hearing these words from the Cross makes perfect sense. Jesus’ ministry is ending in failure. At the most he can number some 120 people as his disciples, but only a handful of them are present with him as he dies, and one of the members of the inner circle has betrayed him and another one has publicly denied even knowing him. Jesus, by the world’s standards, is a loser, a colossal failure.
But from our perspective, and from God’s, these words from the Cross are a shout of triumph. The work that Jesus came to do is completed, his life is complete, fulfilled, there is nothing left undone.
I want us to hold onto both of these ways of hearing these words from the Cross, but not as a way of saying, “This is what the world believes about Jesus’ death, but we know better!” I want us to hold onto both of these ways because they are two sides of the paradox of Jesus’ suffering and death. The triumph does not contradict or overrule the defeat. The triumph is both hidden and revealed in the defeat.
Earlier in John’s account of the God News we hear the High Priest Caiaphas say that it is better for one man to die than that the nation be destroyed. Here Caiaphas stands in the long line of those who believe that to protect the health and stability of society it is often necessary to have a scapegoat, to see someone as the embodiment of all that is evil, all that threatens life as it is meant to be, and to drive out that scapegoat, to kill the enemy of all that is good and holy.
We have been doing that beginning of time, from the day when Adam blamed Eve for ruining his relationship with God, the day when Cain blamed Abel and killed him. We have done this since the beginning of time; the victims change – Jews, immigrants, people of color, the homeless – but the purpose is always the same: the preserve the health and stability and purity of society by driving out, even killing, the enemy, the scapegoat.
Jesus is driven out of the
In his death, Jesus puts an end, a finish to scapegoating, to our mad desire to lay on someone else the burden of our sin, our failure, to hold onto the lie that it is all someone else’s fault and that if we could get rid of – you can fill in the name – get rid of that one, then life would be perfect. From that place of shame and humiliation, Jesus tells us that our days of scapegoating can be over, finished, that this ancient sin which has had us in its grip no longer has any power over us. We are free to look at the world – and ourselves – honestly, free to say, as one of childhood heroes, Pogo possum said on Earth Day in 1970, “We have met the enemy – and he is us.” Free to know that we are the guilty ones who need no scapegoats, only a savior who forgives us. And that we have.
