Sermon preached by The Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Good Friday
Let us pray. O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking, says this about the cross: “Two of the noblest pillars of the ancient world—Roman law and Jewish piety—together supported the necessity of putting Jesus Christ to death in a manner that even for its day was peculiarly loathsome. Thus, the cross stands for the tragic folly of men not just at their worst but at their best.
“Jesus needn’t have died. Presumably he could have followed the advice of friends like Peter and avoided the showdown. Instead he chose to die because he believed that he had to if the world was to be saved. Thus the cross stands for the best that men can do as well as for the worst…..
“For those who believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead early on a Sunday morning and for those also who believe that he provided food for worms just as the rest of us will, the conclusion is inescapable that he came out somehow the winner. What emerged from his death was a kind of way, of truth, of life, without which the last two thousand years of human history would be even more unthinkable than they are.
“A six pointed star, a crescent moon, a lotus—the symbols of other religions suggest beauty and light. The symbol of Christianity is an instrument of death. It suggests, at the very least, hope.”
Buechner looks at the cross from the perspectives of both belief and unbelief, and in both cases the cross comes out the winner. The cross stands for two things. The first is that it is the instrument upon which our Lord accomplished the salvation of the world. Thus, it is the symbol of our salvation.
Secondly, the cross is the symbol of how to live a godly life. Jesus’ death on the cross is both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life. If we are to live the life God intends for every one of his people, then we will live a sacrificially loving life. That doesn’t mean that we are to die on a cross. Jesus did that for us. What it does mean is that his sacrificial death is a symbol for how we are to live.
That is the way God created us—to live in loving service to him and to one another, with God, of course, in the center of our lives. The irony of the cross is that if human beings had chosen to live that kind of life, Jesus’ death on the cross would not have been necessary. Our tendency, thus, is to live with ourselves in the center, expecting others, and even God, to live sacrificially loving lives for us. We get the sacrificial love part right; we just don’t get the fact that we are the ones to do it! The result, of course, always has been, is, and always will be disastrous. That way of living causes tremendous relationship problems in marriages, in families, in churches, in communities, in nations, and in the world. At every level of human relationships sin is at the root of most all of our problems.
The Christian life is one of learning on a daily basis what it means truly to love. We often think of perfection in terms of the negative, that is, perfection is not committing any sins. Yet perfection is so much more than the negative. Perfection is living a perfectly loving life. One could conceivably live without committing sins and still be far from perfect. Thus, the cross is the symbol for the kind of life for which we strive, by the grace of God. When we live that kind of life, the kind of life for which we were created, we are blessed in the process.
When we make the sign of the cross, in fact, we say we are blessing ourselves. Let’s think for a moment about those times when we normally use the sign of the cross. The first time for every person is at baptism. The sign of the cross is made on the forehead of the newly baptized, signifying that this new person in Christ participates in his death and resurrection. Thus, every time we make the sign of the cross thereafter, it is a reminder of our baptism—that we have been buried with Christ and raised to new life in him, that we have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit, made members of his Body, and have been forgiven our sins.
We make the sign of the cross at the mention of the Trinity, at the end of the Gloria in Excelsis and at the end of the creeds. Our life together as Christians includes the profession of a very definite and specific faith in almighty God who has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In holding to this faith, there is an element of sacrifice, in a way. In our culture there is tremendous pressure to bring religious belief down to the lowest common denominator. To maintain that our faith is true, that we know a great deal about God, because God has revealed himself most fully in Jesus of Nazareth, and that salvation is through him alone, is to be very politically incorrect. It is to be judged unenlightened, close-minded. After all, everybody knows that all religions basically teach the same thing.
The truth of the matter, however, is that all religions do not teach the same thing, and the Christian faith teaches that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that salvation is through God the Son, Jesus Christ. When we make the sign of the cross at the mention of the Trinity, there is indeed an element of sacrifice in that belief.
We make the sign of the cross when we have been absolved of our sins. It is through Jesus’ death on the cross that we are given the forgiveness of sins.
We make the sign of the cross when we pray for the departed. We, and our loved ones who have departed this life, are given eternal life through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.
We make the sign of the cross in the Eucharistic prayer when the Celebrant prays that the Holy Spirit will descend upon his people, recalling that we are given the Holy Spirit through the saving work of Christ on the cross.
We make the sign of the cross before and after we receive Holy Communion. We participate anew in Jesus’ death and resurrection every time we receive the Sacrament.
Whenever we bless anything, the food before we eat, objects to be set aside for worship, the crosses many wear around their necks, we make the sign of the cross, reminding ourselves that all of the blessings we receive are connected to Jesus’ death on the cross for our salvation and that we are people who walk the way of the cross daily as a way of life.
This dark day, on which the best man who ever walked the earth was put to death in the most gruesome way possible, we call Good because that death brought about the salvation of the world. The cross on which he died has thus become for us the means of life. Not only did Jesus die for us as a sacrifice for sin, but also in his dying he showed us a way of life. Every time we make the sign of the cross, both of these aspects of the cross are present.
Let us pray. Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.