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Good Friday
April 14, 2006
Delivered by Reverend Sandra Stayner
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22:1-11
Hebrews 10:1-25
John 18:1-19:37
We are deeply immersed in the passion of Christ. We who only last night shared in the feast of love and allowed God himself to kneel and wash our feet now stand at the foot of the cross with Mary his dear mother and John his beloved disciple and of course his friend and companion Mary Magdalene. We see for ourselves the awful consequence of unleashed sin. We see the immensity of God's love for us and for the whole world as Jesus hangs and suffers on the cross that we might find our way back to the arms of God.
As the clergy and Bishops of the diocese gathered this week to renew our ordination vows, the Rev. Barbara Cheney, Rector of St. Paul and St. James in New Haven offered some reflections for meditation. She described a service she had attended, during which the Passion story was re-enacted. Pilate was seated next to the baptismal font at which she had baptized so many people young and old, into the death and resurrection of Christ. As Jesus was condemned to death the processional cross, in the hands of a young acolyte quietly, almost imperceptibly made its way from the high altar, down the steps, through the people gathered around the font, right over to the place that Jesus stood. Barbara described the irrational urge to cry out, to stop the journey of the cross that she had walked behind so many times before it would find its way to the place of Jesus' execution and death. There was nothing she could do, because this is our story. We, in our humanity participate every day in the passion of our Lord, through our negligence, neglect, and lack of true compassion as we continue to walk the path of sin.
The passionate love of Christ for this world ends at the place called Golgotha, the place of execution. For 3 hours he hung on the cross without saying a word - locked in horrible agony, awaiting the certainty of death. And then the awful cry in which he expresses the most profound sense of abandonment by his beloved Father "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?" The silence of God in which even our deepest darkest fears will find a place to rest, is made real for us at the moment of Jesus' death. In the midst of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonizing aloneness comes the still small voice of love - "I am here for you." "Could a mother forsake her young? Even so, I could not forsake you." In the words of Corrie ten Boom from the horrors of a Nazi death camp, "No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still."
It was love that took Jesus to the cross, a passionate love for humanity in its entirety - for the lonely, the outcast, the prisoners in their cells, the tortured, yes and even the ones who torture. The passionately loving Jesus who asked to eat with the sinner Zaccheus, who didn't flinch when a prostitute couldn't hold back her tears as she entered the male only room and broke down at his feet, covering them with her hair in an outrageous show of love for him, would not be prevented from opening wide his arms for all humanity to come. And as we attempt to bar the very ones who Jesus loved from coming to the table as full, participating guests at his table, we perhaps unwittingly march behind the processional cross, not in order to hold out our hands in open embrace, but clutching at the very instrument of death that will crucify our Lord.
Jesus allowed himself to be deeply and passionately in love with our world, for which the world crucified him. As we see him suffer and die, with arms outstretched to love, perhaps we can begin to see how far we are from true, compassionate love, a love that does not judge, but simply desires to meet the other with the same kind of passion that Jesus shows. An inmate from Cheshire prison, reflecting on the events surrounding the crucifixion said this:
The people we lock up and throw away the key, labeling them as faceless nuisances to society, continue like us, to be human beings, many with the capacity and desire to love and be loved, to grow and change and be forgiven as we have been forgiven. As we reflect on the sacrifice made on our behalf, let us also reflect on the ways we have not loved as God loved us, and let us find forgiveness and reconciliation as we all enter the loving embrace of Christ.
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