Good Friday April 2nd, 2010

Good Friday
April 2nd, 2010

“Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’”
Only it wasn’t really a question, was it? It contained its own answer in Pilate’s terms.
Packed in it was a sneer—“there’s no truth, there’s only what feels right, or gets me ahead in the world, or keeps me safe.”
Jesus didn’t answer Pilate’s “what is truth?” fake question.
But his death was an answer. Jesus’ death was gritty, bloody, vicious, and mean. It was true in the grossest meaning of the word—nobody could have made it up.
This Good Friday service is another answer. It confronts us with truths we may not want to face.

Take, for example, this particular Passion Gospel, the Gospel According to John. We need to know some truths about it and the uses that have been made of it through two millennia of Christian history.
Throughout this Gospel, we heard the narrator say, “the Jews” said this, and “the Jews” did that.
When we read the description of Jesus’ death last Sunday from the Gospel according to Luke, we heard something quite different.
That Gospel talks about the Jewish leaders and officials.
It is clear in Luke’s Gospel that the ones who killed Jesus were first, the Romans, who were the only ones in Israel at that time who had the power to put anyone to death, and second, a powerful group of Jewish elite families and individuals who felt themselves threatened by Jesus and who would do anything to get him out of the way.

John’s Gospel was written the last of all the Gospels, around 100 AD.
It was written shortly after a traumatic incident for the young Christian community. For 70 years Jewish Christians had considered themselves just that—both Jewish and Christian.
But just before the Gospel of John was written, the Jewish authorities had thrown the Christians out of the synagogues. So the people John was writing for were insecure, hurt, and, yes, angry about being on their own. Under those circumstances it is not difficult to understand how their anger could result in blaming “the Jews” for what had happened to Jesus.
When the Jews expelled the Christians from the synagogues, they were relatively strong and the Christians were weak. But as Christianity grew to be the dominant religion, terrible things happened.
On the basis of this Gospel particularly, Jews were labeled “Christ killers.” And once that label was available, it justified horrific acts—seizures of land and property, expulsions of Jews from England and Spain and other lands they’d lived in for centuries, and worst of all—repeated slaughter over the centuries of Jewish men women and children.


The point of listening to the story of Jesus’ death on Good Friday is not to find people to blame. The point of listening to the story of Jesus’ death is to face the truth about ourselves.
We can find bits of ourselves in the good people who stood by: like Mary Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, and the other brave women who stood with them. Like John, the youngest apostle and the only one who didn’t run away. Like Nicodemus, a Jewish man of authority, who stood his ground against the Jewish elite and the Romans.
But, alas, we can also recognize bits of ourselves in the cowards, bullies and murderers running free in Jerusalem that terrible not good Friday. We can find bits of ourselves in Judas, Peter, Pilate, the soldiers, the crowds . . . .
Have you been bitter? I have—and it was bitterness that drove Judas to betray his master.
Have you ever been self-righteous? I have—and it was self-righteous Caiphas who argued that “it was better that one person die for the people.”
Have you ever been a coward? I have—and it was cowardice that prompted Peter to deny that he even knew Jesus.
Have your hands ever itched with the desire to hit? Mine have—and it was violent rage that pounded the nails into Jesus’ wrists and feet.
It was not the Jews who killed Jesus. It was not even really the Romans It was human sin, the sins we are all capable of, that killed Jesus. It is our human sin which has kept on blaming and killing down through the ages.

I just finished a fantasy novel, Good Omens, in which the two main characters are an angel and a demon, doing what angels and demons are supposed to do—wandering about the earth tempting and inspiring, etc.
After thousands of years of this, the demon, Crowley, has come to the realization that hell is not the source of all evil and heaven not the source of all good. Rather, he’s discovered, “Where you find the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, is right inside the human mind.”

Pilate asked, “What is truth?”
Today is a day when we’re fortunate enough to be faced with the complicated truth about ourselves: To rejoice in the grace we share with Mary Magdalene and John when we are courageous enough to stand with our friend and master beneath the cross.
And to face too the “heart-stopping evil” whose seeds we all carry within us. Only in facing that appalling truth, truly acknowledging it, admitting it—only then can our hearts break open with sorrow and regret. Only then can the stone roll away and we rise with our Christ into new life.