Good Friday 18 April 2025
Readings: Isaiah 52:13 – 53;12; Psalm 22; 1 Corinthians 1: 18-31; John 18:1 – 19:42
Those who have been doing the Hope 25 Lenten Studies have, in Week 3 become acquainted, or re-acquainted with the Servant Songs, or the Songs of the Suffering Servant in the Book of Isaiah. There are four altogether, and we’ve heard the fourth and most striking of the Songs read this morning, beginning at Isaiah 52:13. Without going into all the details of academic debate here, some say the servant is an individual, a figure from Israel’s past who intercedes for others, bearing their punishments and afflictions. Others say the servant is a community, more specifically the nation of Israel at that particular time I hasten to add. In this, the Fourth Servant Song, the shadows darken, and the suffering of the servant confronts us. The servant is marred beyond human semblance, despised, rejected, a man of suffering (or sorrows), afflicted, wounded, bruised, oppressed, a victim of injustice, cut off from the living, stricken, crushed with pain. When you take those words from the text and put them all together, the image of suffering is almost overwhelming. Yet there is another side – the song speaks – or maybe sings – of a redemptive suffering, of a faithful suffering servant bearing the sins of others. Posthumously, the servant is vindicated by God. I don’t think myself that we can say, as some do, that this passage is a direct prediction of Jesus – it must be allowed to stand on its own as part of sacred scripture, yet it is easy to see how from the very earliest times, in fact from the Gospel writers, Jesus became identified with the suffering servant of Isaiah, indeed Jesus’ own sense of identity and mission may have been shaped by the figure of the suffering servant.
Psalm 22 reflects the image of suffering and taken together, this Psalm, the reading from Isaiah and Good Friday itself force us to confront the whole question of suffering. It is easy to look away. It is easy, like those in Isaiah, to hide our faces. It is all too easy to bypass Good Friday, to jump quickly from Jesus’ entry in triumph into Jerusalem to the joy of Easter Day. During my ministry, more than one person has said to me during Holy Week and Easter each year that they don’t like Good Friday, or they don’t like coming to Good Friday services because it is all too hard. And so it is. But we must wrestle with it all – there can be no resurrection without the cross. We need to recognize the awfulness of the cross – it was used by the Romans as an instrument of state sponsored terror. Crucifixion was for anyone who challenged the dominant power. It still is. Not literally, of course. An article in “The Guardian” written some years ago by two Adelaide writers, one a pastor, the other a commentator on social justice and religion makes this very point. The article is headlined “Who will we crucify this Easter? Same as always: those who defy power and privilege”[1]
Jesus dies like a rebellious slave or common criminal, in torment and shame. Early Christians wrestled with this. Justin Martyr wrote in the second century “They say our madness consists in the fact that we put a crucified man in second place after the eternal word of God.”[2] The crucifixion did not appear in Christian art until the fourth century. Is this because it was too difficult to contend with? Even then, art sanitized what crucifixion was like. A few years ago, Libbie and I attended a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion here in Brisbane. It was a sublime performance, wonderfully presented, an extended musical reflection on Christ’s suffering – yet the act of crucifixion itself takes place off stage, and we are left to imagine.
Where is God in our experiences of suffering and abandonment? We try to justify our sufferings, and let God off the hook, by too easily asserting that suffering is allowed by God as part of “God’s plan” and all will be well in the end. Theologically and from our human experience this affirmation is problematic and difficult to support. All is not always well – at the graveside, in traumatic experiences, in agonizing deaths. All the gospel writers in their own way try to make sense of the crucifixion for their readers. Luke for example addresses his gospel to “most excellent Theophilus”, a member of the elite, so Luke frames the passion as the martyrdom of an innocent man. John refers the crucifixion back to the story of the serpent being lifted up in the wilderness – the point of curse becomes the point of blessing. Mark refers to the suffering servant. The scriptures point to a number of ways in which the crucifixion can be thought of – there is no single way.
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”, we will sing. Well, we weren’t physically – but we are all part of a culture that has an ambiguous relationship to violence. In one sense we recoil from it, yet in other ways there is and always has been a dark current of violence in our society. You only need to read T-shirts at the shopping centre or bumper stickers as you drive around. Recently, the police have laid several charges against people making death threats on social media platforms against those with whom they disagree. We live in a world characterized by both implicit and explicit violence against the Earth in our greed and misuse of resources, the violence of child and adult slavery and sex trafficking, disparity between the wealthy and vulnerable, often maintained by violent means, state sponsored terror, mob violence, religious violence, grinding oppression, the plague of domestic violence. Evil resides within each of us. Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”[3] Are we any better morally or spiritually than many of those who shouted for Jesus’ crucifixion, those who stood idly by doing nothing to prevent it, and implicitly sentenced Jesus by their being swept up by the mob?
For myself, one way in which I try to make sense of all of this is to think of God as a fellow sufferer – that on the cross it is God who suffers, that there is no suffering into which God does not enter, that God suffers with us in all that besets us. The German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell during the Second World War that only a suffering God can save. Some would want to go so far as to say that divine suffering is a heresy, based on the belief that the divine nature is incapable of suffering and that Jesus’ suffering touched his humanity but left his divinity unsullied. With others I believe that the deeper heresy is the belief that God does not suffer with the world. God is not indifferent to human struggle and pain. A passionless, unfeeling, remote God can neither heal nor save. In contrast to a passionless deity, for me a meaningful vision of Good Friday proclaims that God suffered on the cross in an act of supreme self-giving and love. The suffering servant reveals to us, I think, something of the true nature of God.
It can be difficult to admit our complacency and culpability in the world’s violence, it can be difficult to admit the ways we crucify our Lord, yet if we can on Good Friday answer “yes” to the question, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” we can also say “yes” to the grace that feels our suffering and regret and repentance, that feels the pain of those broken by the world’s greed and complacency, and we can live in the hope that the One who suffers for and with us also forgives and transforms will enable us to rise up renewed and transformed.
See, as they strip the robe from off his back
And spread his arms and nail them to the cross,
The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black,
And love is firmly fastened on to loss.
But here a pure change happens. On this tree
Loss becomes gain, death opens into birth.
Here wounding heals and fastening makes free,
Earth breathes in heaven, heaven roots in earth.
And here we see the length, the breadth, the height,
Where love and hatred meet and love stays true,
Where sin meets grace and darkness turns to light,
We see what love can bear and be and do.
And here our Saviour calls us to his side,
His love is free, his arms are open wide.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/30/who-will-we-crucify-this-easter-same-as-always-those-who-defy-power-and-privilege
[2] Justin Martyr First Apology Chapter 13
[3] Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2
© The Rev’d WD Crossman