John 18:1—19:42
April 14, 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
I can still vividly remember the number of times when I was growing up in Boston if you can believe it as a little challenging or disobedient of my mother. Knowing that my mother never liked to talk about funerals and death and dying, I would sometime mention it. She would say, “What are you talking about? Wash out you mouth!” Unlike here in San Francisco, the more civil response is, “Here’s a large lisee!” We would do anything to avoid speaking about death and dying. So what is so good about Good Friday when it’s all about death and dying?
On Friday of Holy Week, we ask probably the most quarreled question about God: “Why won’t God act like God? Against the most feared reality of life—death and dying, where is God? What’s so good about today when God doesn’t act like God?
Acting like God
All of the gospels agree on the facts of this day. Jesus, Son of God, Messiah, the long-awaited redeemer of Israel is crucified and suffers a most horrible death. On the cross, his suffering and pain are real. And he just hangs there. You can see for yourself the picture on your bulletin.
In Mark 15:29-31, we read that “Those who passed by derided him…save yourself, and come down from the cross!…In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, ‘He saved others; he cannot save himself.’” This is a dark day when the battle of life and death is raging in full strength but Jesus just hangs on the cross while the world mocks him.
The voices of the religious leaders, the scholars, the crowd, and even the thieves on their crosses ask, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” (Mt. 27:40) But he doesn’t.
Remember at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry that no sooner had Jesus risen from the waters of baptism with the divine voice still ringing in his ears saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,” that he hears another voice from Satan, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Mt. 4:3) If you are the Son of God, cast yourself down and let the angels save you. If you are the Son of God, don’t you want all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor? If you are, then do something to prove that you are who you say you are? Why won’t God act like God?
Isn’t this what religion is supposed to do? People believe you when you can change stones to bread. Power to do good is what we want to see. When we have a full house at church worship, we would say it must be the power of God. When we are miraculously healed from an illness, we thank God for the power of healing. When people give their lives to Jesus and sense complete joy and peace, we credit that to God’s powerful presence. Once we turned our lives over to Jesus and everything goes wonderful for us we would say, “That’s power!” That’s the kind of God we want to see. But that’s not the kind of God we meet tonight on Good Friday.
If you are the Son of God, why hasn’t everyone followed you? They have all fled and denied they ever have known you. If you are the God-sent Messiah, why is there still evil and suffering in the world? If you are the Son of God, then what are you doing just hanging from the cross?
We know we have heard the voice of God saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved…” But in the wilderness, or on the cross, there’s another voice and sometimes it’s our voices, “If you are the Son of God, then why won’t you act like God?”
Parents sometimes worry when their children go to college. They fear for the spiritual well-being of their children. “There are so many temptations in college!” we might say. We know that it’s not college that tempts us. It’s life. The most deadly temptations are not some college dorm on Saturday night or some open-minded professor in a classroom on Monday, but in the hospital room when the cancer won’t heal. Or a late night phone call that all parents fear, or the marriage that will not work, or the noonday demons of despair that debilitate us. That’s when there is a voice, and maybe it’s your own, whispering, “If I am a Christian, then why isn’t God acting like God? What’s so good about this day when God doesn’t act like God?
Failed Messiah
You know what they expected. Jesus is called “Messiah” the long-expected figure who will arise in Israel, gather an army, rout the Romans, establish a new and just government, and rule forever. Power, effectiveness, success are the expectations. This is why all the mocking. This is what they were waiting for. If you are the Son of God…then where are your troops?
Whoever heard of a crucified Messiah? It’s a failed messiah who ends up on a cross. It’s a failed religion that doesn’t produce results when results are desperately needed. The people cried out to God in their distress and yet he just hangs there.
Did you notice that this same question that we have asked tonight, “Why won’t God act like God?” was within Jesus’ own heart as well? “If you are the Son of God…then…” was a cry not only from the sneering crowd but even within Jesus’ own heart. If he was to share our full humanity, if he was to be tempted as we are tempted, then he could not have been immune from the question too.
Jesus prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me” (Mt. 26:39). Then toward the end, with his last ounce of life, having drunk the cup of suffering, his awesome, terrible cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46)
Thus even Jesus was tempted to ask, as he hung there: Did I misunderstand the voice at my baptism? Was the way I walked and was the things I taught the path of God or only my self-delusion? Surely in his utter misery, he must have been tempted to ask, “If I am the Son of God…then, my God, why?”
We must ask as well. Is Jesus on the cross a failure, a poor, deluded, if well-meaning prophet, or was he a success? Was the cross just another example of innocent suffering? The crowd, it appears, knew for sure what we have here. A messiah on a cross is definitely a failed messiah.
But what was it for Jesus? Probably the last and greatest temptation for Jesus was at the end to admit to himself that what he thought was the voice and will of God was only a delusion or wishful thinking. Like Job, he could have cursed God and waited for sweet death.
Jesus does neither. He just hangs there, as his last ounce of life is squeezed from him through the worst form of tortured ever devised.
In C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, he talks about a seasoned devil teaching his apprentice devil-in-training. The devil admits that one of the most terrifying things for a devil is to find a human being who, amid terrible torment, with no will to love or please God, still intends to do God’s will. It’s when an assaulted believer looks around a universe from which every trace of God seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. No evidence that God is around. No real desire to please God and feeling forsaken, still obeys. That is what Satan most fears.
My mother may not have liked to think about or even mention about death in the fear that by doing so, it may bring such tragedies to light. But when it comes to Jesus on the cross, we can’t avoid it. What happened on the cross is that he just hung there and died. Amid no evidence that God was going to rescue him and suffering the worst form of death penalty devised in those days, Jesus still obeyed.
That’s why we call this Friday good.
In my last Sunday’s Palm Sunday message, I made the point that if Jesus’ mission in the world climaxed on his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, it would be a false climax. The story is not finished yet until we go through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We would have a fantasy Savior in a magic kingdom unless we go through Good Friday.
Barbara Brown Taylor shared a time when she was reading a new Bible storybook with her four-year-old goddaughter, Madeline. Taylor said, “Madeline began showing me her favorite pictures which were Adam and Eve hiding from God in the Garden of Eden and Absalom hanging from the tree by his hair. As she outlined the story of the flood for me, my fingers began to itch. I wanted to see how the authors of this children’s book had presented Jesus’ death. Could I look ahead, I asked her?
“This is not about Jesus yet,” she said sternly, but she let me look anyway.
I had to look hard. In between a long account of the last supper and a richly illustrated section on the empty tomb, I found a half a page with a picture of three crosses far away on a hillside at sunset. It was so small and dark that I could not even tell whether the crosses were occupied. The text was not much help. “Then Jesus was put to death,” it read, “but he did not stay dead for long. God had planned a big surprise for him, which happened at dawn on Easter morning.”
“That is all Madeline will learn about the suffering of Christ (from that book at least). The authors apparently decided that God’s pain would be too hard for a child to understand. So they left it out, and I imagine that more than a few parents are grateful to them. Who wants to explain that bloody episode to a child?” said Taylor.
Are we old enough tonight to understand all the death and dying that happened on the cross that day? If my mother was still alive, would she still tell me to stop talking about death and have my mouth washed out?
What’s so good about Good Friday is that God didn’t act the way we wanted God to act.
Good Friday
Jesus was tested, tempted in every way, down to the depths of death and dying. Yet he did not succumb to the demands of the crowd or even the pleas within himself. He remained obedient, commending his Spirit into the hands of God, showing us the way into and through the darkness, toward the God who, though silent, is still followed in trust. Into the darkness, Jesus not knowing what is going on in the pain still trusted God to work in the pain according to God’s will.
What’s so good about Good Friday is that Jesus just hangs there saying nothing, doing nothing. This was his greatest act of divine defiance.
On the cross, he does not call out legions of angels to save him. On the cross, his suffering and pain are real. He just hangs there.
As he hangs there, our notions of who God is get rearranged. Here is a God who wins victories through suffering by entering into the pain of life, rather than circumventing the pain.
What’s so good about Good Friday is that God chose not to act like the God we expected. We expected omnipotent, decisiveness, and messianic. Instead in obedience to God’s will, Jesus just hung there, his tortured body a new image of God among us. God, not as the omnipotence one but as the suffering servant, is immersed in our pain so that he might deliver us. God, not through power, but through suffering love redeems us.
My mother’s fear of death and dying is understandable when we see that life is precious and sometimes only hanging at the end of a thread. But the reason why Good Friday is so good is that death is not the last word anymore. The reason why Good Friday is so good is that God refused to act like God but emptied himself by pouring out his life on the cross so that we may have eternal life. Good Friday is so good because we know that on Easter morning, Jesus the Christ is raised from the dead with the promise that death does no have the last word anymore.
Thank God for making Good Friday so good.
Let us pray.
O Lord God, this Friday is so good because in obedience to your plan Jesus was taken and cruelly crucified. Hanging there, with the world mocking, suspended between heaven and earth, nailed between two thieves, Jesus suffered, breathed his last, and died.
Help us, Lord Jesus, to comprehend the mystery of your sacrifice on our behalf. Help us to see the strength in your weakness, the power in your powerlessness. Grant us the grace to see, in your cross, the source of life, the ground of hope.
Only then will this bleak Friday be good to us. Amen.
Benediction
Good Friday is here, and Easter is not yet.
The promise is before us to see its power.
Let us hold fast to our hopes, without wavering.
Let us provoke one another to love and good deeds.
Now may the grace of Jesus Christ who made this Friday good,
the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Amen.