Good Friday 2024
The Reverend Shearon Sykes Williams
Saint George’s Episcopal Church, Arlington, Virginia
Good Friday, March 29th, 2024
“They will look on the one whom they have pierced.”
Today is Good Friday, the darkest day of the church year. We gather to remember Jesus’ death, just as Christians throughout the ages have gathered on this day to remember that day, that day of unspeakable cruelty, violence, and injustice. We gather because looking at it alone would just be too painful. And we come together to remember not just the first Good Friday, but to also look at ourselves and our world today.
Jesus lived under the violent and oppressive rule of the Roman Empire. Today violence still plaques the Holy Land. War rages in Gaza and around the globe, there are wars and all manner of human suffering. In our own country, fear, cynicism and despair about our civic life threatens to kill our spirits. The drumbeat of growing danger to our minds, bodies and spirits intensifies as today’s story unfolds and it is still unfolding today.
Every year on this darkest of days, we hear the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John. And as today’s passion was sung so beautifully and hauntingly, we heard the story of two kingdoms clashing, the kingdom of peace and the kingdom of conflict. And at every juncture of the story, Jesus responds to violence with non-violence. When the Roman soldiers and temple police come to arrest Jesus in the garden, Jesus does not resist. When Peter cuts off the ear of one of the soldiers, Jesus tells him to put away his sword. When Jesus is bound and taken for questioning before the temple authorities about the content of his teaching, Jesus responds that he has always spoken openly and transparently. “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” And when things escalate further, he is taken to Pilate who asks Jesus if he is the King of his people, and Jesus responds, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.” And even though Pilate was afraid that Jesus might indeed be who he said he was and did not want to sentence Jesus to death, he succumbed to the intense pressure to do just that. The cries of “Crucify him! Crucify him! “ were just too much.
Doing the right thing is seldom the easy thing. Doing the right thing is very often the hard thing.
So, Pilate sentenced Jesus to death. Jesus was tortured and then forced to drag a huge wooden cross to the Place of the Skull, and in the words of the prophet Isaiah, was “lifted up…and very high.”
It is so hard to look at Jesus on the cross today, even in our imaginations. His last act from that exalted place was to establish a new kind of human family, not based on flesh and blood but on love and deep abiding with one another. To his mother he says, “Woman, here is your son. And to his closet disciple, “Here is your mother.” Selfless love, God’s love, defined Jesus’ life until the very end.
Words are powerful. They can bring life or they can bring death, and Jesus’ words always brought life, even as he was about to die an unspeakably horrible and unjust death. In fact, Christians proclaim that Jesus is God’s eternal Word, spoken from before time and forever. And at the beginning of the Gospel of John, he tells us, “everything came into being through the Word and not one thing came into being except through him.” The Divine Word then, is what holds everything together. Before Jesus the Word was here in the flesh, while the Word was here in the flesh, and after the Word was here in the flesh. Christ, through all eternity, is the binding agent of the cosmos. He holds us together individually, giving each of our lives meaning and coherence, and he binds us together as the Christian community as we bear witness to the world in his name, and most importantly, most importantly, the powerful, life-giving Word of God binds the human family together. We are fundamentally, foundationally connected to one another on a cellular level, no matter how much we try to deny it or resist it. We BELONG to one another, we belong to each other across creeds and nations, across gender and ethnic identities and all distinctions. We stand beneath the cross today, all of us: a Muslim beside a Jew, who then extends their hand to a Christian; a Russian next to a Ukranian, a transgender person hand-in-hand with someone who struggles to recognize the dignity of every human being, in all our diversity, a billionaire next to a poor, undocumented immigrant.
Today Christ beholds us from the cross and sees the human family, his family, through the eyes of love. As we gaze together on the one whom we have pierced, let us pray, let us plead, let us beg, that we will be guided to do, not what is easy, but what is right. To seek the way of peace. To strive for justice. And to love our siblings with a sacrificial love. The Word spoke the human family into being in the beginning of time and came in the flesh to give his entire life for us so that we might claim life now and forever more. God’s Word has never been silent. God speaks, and perhaps most powerfully from the silence of the cross. “They will look on the one whom they have pierced.”