For Good Friday

In the midst of all the controversy and Jesus-bashing of recent times, we can confidently say one thing. No other human being has ever commanded such attention over a period of 2000 years. It is unavoidable, given human nature, that there will be varying interpretations of the meaning of his life. Yet the new Testament insists on these basic points;

1. In the Crucifixion of Jesus the Scriptures are fulfilled, that is to say, it was according to the plan and purpose of God from the beginning.
2. The Cross was for sin, that is, the atonement for sin and the overcoming of sin.
3. The Cross was for us -- that is, on our behalf, in our place, and for our transformation.

"According to the Scriptures," "for sin," and "for us". These phrases hold the key to the meaning of the Cross. Why should we believe the latest here-today-and-gone-tomorrow academic theory? These media-pleasing ideas are dressed up as though they were something new, but all of them have been sent around the ring before and have become tired and stale, whereas millions of people for 2000 years have put their trust in the Biblical witness and found it full of new life and new promise for every generation. Your presence here today attests -- for those who have ears to hear -- that Christ's Crucifixion was indeed the central event in the history of the world, unveiling as it does the very nature of the God who stands at the beginning and at the end, the Alpha and Omega, who is and who was and who is to come (Revelation 1:8).

As the gospel and Epistles of John emphasise, what our God accomplished for us in the Cross of Christ was the consummation of love. But this is not the soft, fuzzy sort of love that predominates in our sentimental culture ("Love is a warm puppy"). This is the love that goes to war. We understand from the New Testament that there is a war to be fought-- a war against sin, a war against evil, a war against Satan, a war against death. The war is fought by the love of God at work in the Crucifixion of Jesus. There has never been such a radical disclosure of anything whatsoever as what we see revealed at Golgotha. It seemed that day that there was an obliteration of love, an annihilation of love, and extermination of goodness, a total eclipse of God. In order to understand what Jesus has done, we really must try to put ourselves back into the place of those first disciples. No one anywhere at any time had ever put forth the idea that the Messiah of God would be put to death in a shameful fashion that was guaranteed to degrade, to disgust, and permanently to discredit. Even though Jesus himself had tried many times to warn them, they were totally unprepared, just as you and I would have been, to cope with the utter collapse of their masters mission. God himself appeared to have withdrawn from the battlefield.

The ways of God are indeed strange. Listen to the words of the prophet Isaiah: "the Lord will rise up .... to do his deed -- strange as his deed! And to do his work -- alien is his work?" (Isaiah 28:21). Martin Luther called this God's Opus Alienum: his alien work. The greatest challenges to Christian faith of those times when God seems to be either absent or, even worse, actively malevolent, sending one affliction after another to people and families without any apparent reason, piling on trouble where trouble has already made a seemingly permanent dwelling. The Old Testament is full of complaints about this. "Oh Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and thou wilt not hear?" (Habakkuk 1:2). There are no satisfactory answers to these questions about God's apparent failure to act. We do not offer "answers" today. God will not give us an "answer"; he gave his only Son. What we offer today is the divine drama: the king must die. All our stories are gathered up into the story of the humiliation of the Son of God. The paradox of the Crucifixion is the enactment of the abandonment of God by God in the person of God himself -- "the Crucified God." This makes no earthly sense, but it is this "strange work" which enables us to hold on in the dark. In the darkness at noon that descended on Calvary, God's hand was visibly at work. This action of God is not made known in the blaze of light so that the whole world will be stunned into submission. It is made known in the darkness of the grave.

Here is the Lord's word for all who are gathered at the foot of the Cross today. If you know what it is like to feel abandoned by God, if you have wondered if Christian faith is in fact a hoax and a sham, if you feel that pain and loneliness are a cruel joke on people who are fool enough to trust a God who willdoesn't appear to be around when you need him, Good Friday is for you. In this inconceivable action of submission to the very worst that "the world, the flesh and the Devil" can do, the Father and the Son together, in the power of the Holy Spirit, have completed the work of salvation. "It is finished" (John 19:30). Blessed are those who have eyes to see and ears to hear that Christ's completed work is accomplished precisely in the moment of seeming defeat. The weapon is his own body. The signs of victory are his wounds. "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain" (Revelation 5:12). In the darkness of the night of human pain, we are joined to him in his promise of everlasting day. "From henceforth," wrote St Paul, "let no one make trouble for me; for I bear on my body the marks of the Lord Jesus" (Galatians 6:17). Amen.