6th April 2007Good Friday

Fr Julian Browning

Good Friday is an angry day. The anger is in the story. There's the anger of the mob. What means this rage and spite? People get angry when they are frightened. Darkness covers the land. All the things we fear most: mockery, being misunderstood, being betrayed by our friends, violence, pain, despair, loneliness, here they are. The procession has stopped, at Golgotha, the place of the skull. The procession with Jesus, which we've been on this week, stops now. And there, right in front of us, is what we fear most of all: death.

When I survey the wondrous Cross, is not a weird devotion to suffering. It's joining in the prayer of Jesus on the Cross, Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.

Theology isn't much use at this point. We can ramble on about being having died already with Christ in our baptism, and all that stuff, but is there any point in that? What we see is a horrible death. What do we do now?  Of course the liturgy will carry us through it all, as it has done all week. What we don't know how to do privately, we can do publicly and it's helpful. But it is still hard to stay here on Golgotha, the place of the skull. I have an uneasy feeling that Golgotha is the real world, where we live. Maybe we should expect the truth about the world to break through at this point, on this day. For a lot of the rest of the year we're playing at fantasy Christianity, Christianity without the Passion, spiritual comfort food, religious Valium to keep us happy little smileys, dead to the world, and out of trouble. Today we're in big trouble. The Cross, this extreme act of violence against an innocent man, is a summary of all the sin that ever was. That includes us, and our rejection, day by day, of God and His Son. This isn't just a drama class, an acting out of what happened back then. What happened then is happening now. In the Gospels we have a glimpse, an eyefull, of what God is like at all times. I think the despair which washes over us on Good Friday, is a sort of loneliness, because we know we're part of the scene, but we don't know how to follow Jesus now, that pain, that anguish is not for the likes of us. But the death we see is a real human death, just like our own. He is thirsty, he bows his head, he dies. Life stops. It is finished. And at the point of death, we hear from the cross an entirely human cry, an angry cry, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Here is a death which we can not pretend hasn't happened. We prefer to deny death, if we can. It is comforting for us to think that the body dies, clinically, and yet a bit of us keeps going, doesn't die at all. Maybe, but it's not what happened to Jesus. He was a mortal man, who died and was buried, and his life was inseparable from his body, so when he appears to the disciples after the Resurrection it is not as a disembodied spirit, but in a body, wounds and all.

That terrible cry, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? is the first line of Psalm 22.  That Psalm is all about the suffering of the just man rejected by God. I thirst is from Psalm 69. The final words, recorded by Luke, Father into thy hands I commit my spirit, is from Psalm 31. So those are words written down already, in a holy book, and now on the Cross, in a world that's all too real, packed with weapons and pain and death, the words become flesh again. What we used to read and hear, we can now see in human flesh like ours. The scriptures live in human  form. Jesus dies praying. This is something that we might miss, from where we're standing. We think he's calling Elijah to save him. Mockery and contempt, you see, always creeping in. What we try to see, and we need do nothing more than see, is a man who dies praying, praying to His Father in heaven, offering failure, the sum of all his actions, to God. The death of Jesus was aligned with God's will, just as in his life and ministry he did God's will. Jesus died at prayer. The Cross becomes the great prayer of our religion. This explains the strange images of Christian art and devotion. In the cross of Christ I glory, When I survey the wondrous Cross, is not a weird devotion to suffering. It's joining in the prayer of Jesus on the Cross, Father into thy hands I commend my spirit. That's what gives us hope. That's the prayer which turns the wood of the Cross into the tree of glory. Because that is the prayer which God heard and answered, as he always will. If we can share in the prayer, then we shall share in the answer to the prayer. The answer to the prayer is a new life, not the old one carrying on, but a new life, an eternal life, a resurrection life. Today is a day of darkness and loss. That is the truth of Good Friday and the truth about our lives. But when the Cross becomes a prayer, all that anger and fear will fade away, to be replaced by hope, because death is conquered by love, and by love alone. Christ on the Cross, defeated in the eyes of the world, is to our eyes the Prince of Glory, as beautiful as the God He is.