Good Friday

2 April 2010

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator

New York City

Years ago, there was a pop psychology book written called I’m OK, You’re Ok. At the time, there were some people who thought it had something useful to say about the Christian faith. And, from time to time it is still read, I think. A few year ago, a student at a nearby seminary bought the book and read it, and then was moved to post a cartoon on the school bulletin board. He had drawn a picture of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross. And he captioned the picture: If I’m okay and you’re OK, then what am I doing up here?”

We are not Okay. What the church says about our situation is this: We were made to be perfect, but we have abused our freedom and have distorted the image of God in us. That is what the church calls original sin. The idea of original sin is the only Christian doctrine, which can be proved empirically. Just look at the facts. The twentieth century alone was replete with evidence. The Armenian holocaust before WWI was a slaughter of thousands of innocents. During the second war, National Socialism slaughtered millions of Jews. Scholars suggest that international socialism, a movement originally designed to perfect humanity, actually resulted in the slaughter of twenty million men and women. In China alone.

You do not have to look for evidence in strange places where strange tongues are spoken. Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer prize winning reporter for the NY Times, went to see the Siberian prison camps run by Stalin in communist Russia. He came back and wrote a glowing praise of that savage regime, totally ignoring a genocide of which he was completely aware.

Or, and here it gets uncomfortably personal, look into the dark corners of your life and mine. There are the big lies told for gain, and the little lies told for convenience and appearance’s sake.

The Good Friday liturgy demands that we look honestly at the horrors of the human situation, both social and personal. The sanguine humanist, critical of any religion which dares “to judge” will brush off such an examination of our souls. But if we are brutally honest, we know the scope and depth of our failures. Paradoxically, it is probably our inner fears of being publicly exposed which most deftly confirm our guilt.

The passion of Christ is like a trial in a courtroom where we are found guilty by the recitation of an irrefutable list of evidence. The whole of human life is in there. Betrayal of friends, abandonment of those we said we loved, cruelty and abuse of the weak, corruption of government and misuse of civic power, conspiracy and dishonesty. If you cannot find yourself in the characters of the passion, you are not being honest or not looking very hard. We are guilty.

And the passion of Christ is the courtroom where the sentence might be handed down. We have no grounds for appeal, knowing that the punishment we deserve is right around the corner. Except that in the last minute, the judge steps down from the bench, throws aside his gown and announces that he is going to accept the penalty we deserve.

Shocking. Never heard such a thing. The innocent and honest judge goes to die in the place of the guilty criminal. And there is something horribly wrong with this substitution of the judge for the guilty. Why does God do this? Why does the son of God, who is God in all his fullness, accept this?

God cannot simply brush off the atrocities of human failure because to do so would be to say that these awful things do not matter and no one need be called to account for them. The eternal balance of justice would not allow us to say that what we have done, what the human race has done, does not matter.

If we are to stand for a just life and hope for a fair society, we cannot begin by saying that human failure simply does not matter. God cannot say it does not matter because it matters for the kind of world we are trying to create. Our failures cannot be brushed off.

And, second, God substitutes himself for the guilty because of his overarching, boundless love. He loves us so much he cannot bear to leave us in our mess.

The crucifixion is about those two things held in tension: The justice of God on one had and the love of God on the other. Both things are necessary for understanding God—justice and love.

From now on, there is nothing of which we need be ashamed. We do not need to cover any longer in the dark corners of sin and death. There is an eternal light which shines into those corners and that light is the eternal life to which we are called through the one who hangs on the cross today The writer of that funny old book yeas ago almost got it right. The cross of Christ is about saying, in the only lasting cosmic and eternal way, ‘I’m not okay, you’re not okay. But, we are about to be made perfect in the only lasting way.