Episcopal Church of Our Savior

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The Rev. Ajung Sojwal Good Friday , Year C, Sunday April 6, 2007 John 18:1-19:37 One of the most difficult things about Christianity for a lot of people today is the significance of Good Friday. The argument is that the cross is just too cruel and bloody to accept as something redemptive. It is a very jarring thing for the modern mind to come to terms with such cruelty and death as being sanctioned by a loving God, so instead we like to focus much more on Easter and some will even go as far as to reject Christianity altogether. But no matter how hard we try to distance ourselves from the scandal of the Cross, the fact is that Christianity has no message without the presence of the cross. The cross is the centerpiece of our identity, by this I do not presume to understand the full meaning of the cross. But I do believe that in our will to walk into the profound mystery of the redemptive act on the cross we will find ourselves face to face with God. A few years ago, I attended a talk given by a Christian leader on making the Christian message more relevant to people. I must admit that everything he said managed to rub me the wrong way, somewhere along the line he pull up some statistical study on the co-relation between economic well-being and church growth, his point being that people are more likely to attend church if they are doing well financially. At which point I decided I have had quite enough of his marketing strategies. If we are looking to find something that will make us feel good about ourselves, the message of Good Friday is certainly not it. It is good to remind ourselves ever so often, that Jesus was not crucified in a temple or a church. Rather, it was in the outskirts of the city where only the most marginalized of the society found some form of refuge away from the economic center of the city, which invariably succeeded in reminding them of their impoverished lives. The fact is that Good Friday is everything and more about God’s as well as our own suffering. It is the most blatant recognition of human suffering as a condition brought on by our sinful nature wherein God deliberately and willfully chose to situate Himself as the redeeming factor. Over the years, churches have become very wary of using the word “sin.” It is as if talking about sin has become sinful in itself. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, and nobody wants to be seen as being judgmental. And talking about sin is looked at as being judgmental and pessimistic. So, we try to avoid the word sin, instead we talk about our weaknesses and our shortcomings, weaknesses that can be controlled or overcome with a little bit of support, self-determination and a positive outlook. What we fail to understand is that the more we allow ourselves to think about our sinful nature as mere weaknesses or shortcomings, the less likely we are to believe in God’s redemptive plan for the world. Because of our aversion to talking about sin and our role or the role of sin in our lives, we have allowed the significance of Holy Week to become somewhat neutralized. By loosening our grip on the significance of Holy Week, especially the Cross, we expose ourselves to the danger of coming in and out of our worship as mere spectators. And as spectators we land up looking at Jesus’ walk into Jerusalem, his washing of his disciple’s feet, his trial, his sentence, his death and his resurrection as nothing more than a great piece of artwork, with the ability to move us for as long as we choose to stand and admire it. And like any art piece, the Cross-loses its significance as we leave the Church. In order for us to be participants in the Holy Week events and celebrations, we need to understand that to a large degree we hold the paint and the paintbrush in our hands. The picture on the canvas of Holy Week is our picture. We are the crowd, the soldiers, the betrayer, the religious authority, the scared disciples, the self-invested Roman rulers, the mockers and the torturers, and also the ones that Jesus understands and forgives from the cross. In order for us to be able to fully capture the hues of the resurrection light with our paintbrush we have to first understand just how dark and complicated the pictures leading up to the resurrection were. We certainly can never fully comprehend the complexity of all that happened on that first Good Friday. But, we can surely understand the depth of our inability to redeem ourselves from our deep rebellion against God when we hear Jesus saying, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” The invasiveness of sin is such in our lives that we are unable to even see that we are in need of forgiveness and redemption from God. The events of Good Friday continues to expose the extent of our depraved souls, which has the twisted capacity and the willingness to re-define love, peace and justice to suit our immensely selfish desires. Yet, Jesus in His willingness to soak in and forgive all the violence and judgement inflicted on Him shows us God’s deep desire and intention to redeem and to heal us. Every time we suppress the seriousness of our sinful nature, we are in fact rejecting the redemption that God is offering for us at the cross. God knows and understands only too well that there is profound suffering in our sinful nature. He is the one who created us and like only a creator can know his creation, God alone knows the core of our suffering and sin. And in His death, Jesus took that core to His grave and gave us the possibility of a transformed and new life. The gift of that transformed life is God’s intimate presence and healing in our suffering in this life and the hope of His just and holy Kingdom taking root in our lives. We cannot extricate the violence of Good Friday, nor can we mask the repulsiveness of the Cross, and so it remains that the good news of God’s redemption on the Cross will always be about faith in Him. Christian faith calls us to look at the Cross-as redemptive, not accusatory, it calls us to hope not dejection, and it calls us to forgive and heal. In one of our hymns we sing: What language shall I borrow to thank you, dearest friend, For this your dying sorrow, your pity without end? Oh, Make me yours forever! And should I faint, Lord, let me never, never, outlive my love for you. Indeed, no language on earth can express the gratitude we should express toward God for His love and redemption on the Cross. But more than a thankful heart, God’s desire is for us to receive and nurture that hope which He offers at the Cross. Our hope is in Jesus’ words of forgiveness from the cross, it is in his promise of paradise to us transgressors, it is in his gift of enduring relationships, it is in His experience of abandonment as a reflection of our own sense of lostness, it is hope that makes Him cry out for water from the very people that hung him on the cross, and only hope could have given the strength and endurance to finish all that Jesus had set out to do on the cross. And finally, when Jesus commends his spirit into the Father’s hands, it is with the definitive hope that God will follow through with His redemption and healing. May God give us the grace to look at the Cross with hope and faith rather than shame and judgement. Amen.

The Rev. Ajung Sojwal

Good Friday , Year C, Sunday April 6, 2007
John 18:1-19:37

One of the most difficult things about Christianity for a lot of people today is the significance of Good Friday. The argument is that the cross is just too cruel and bloody to accept as something redemptive. It is a very jarring thing for the modern mind to come to terms with such cruelty and death as being sanctioned by a loving God, so instead we like to focus much more on Easter and some will even go as far as to reject Christianity altogether. But no matter how hard we try to distance ourselves from the scandal of the Cross, the fact is that Christianity has no message without the presence of the cross. The cross is the centerpiece of our identity, by this I do not presume to understand the full meaning of the cross. But I do believe that in our will to walk into the profound mystery of the redemptive act on the cross we will find ourselves face to face with God.

A few years ago, I attended a talk given by a Christian leader on making the Christian message more relevant to people. I must admit that everything he said managed to rub me the wrong way, somewhere along the line he pull up some statistical study on the co-relation between economic well-being and church growth, his point being that people are more likely to attend church if they are doing well financially. At which point I decided I have had quite enough of his marketing strategies. If we are looking to find something that will make us feel good about ourselves, the message of Good Friday is certainly not it. It is good to remind ourselves ever so often, that Jesus was not crucified in a temple or a church. Rather, it was in the outskirts of the city where only the most marginalized of the society found some form of refuge away from the economic center of the city, which invariably succeeded in reminding them of their impoverished lives. The fact is that Good Friday is everything and more about God’s as well as our own suffering. It is the most blatant recognition of human suffering as a condition brought on by our sinful nature wherein God deliberately and willfully chose to situate Himself as the redeeming factor.

Over the years, churches have become very wary of using the word “sin.” It is as if talking about sin has become sinful in itself. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, and nobody wants to be seen as being judgmental. And talking about sin is looked at as being judgmental and pessimistic. So, we try to avoid the word sin, instead we talk about our weaknesses and our shortcomings, weaknesses that can be controlled or overcome with a little bit of support, self-determination and a positive outlook. What we fail to understand is that the more we allow ourselves to think about our sinful nature as mere weaknesses or shortcomings, the less likely we are to believe in God’s redemptive plan for the world. Because of our aversion to talking about sin and our role or the role of sin in our lives, we have allowed the significance of Holy Week to become somewhat neutralized.

By loosening our grip on the significance of Holy Week, especially the Cross, we expose ourselves to the danger of coming in and out of our worship as mere spectators. And as spectators we land up looking at Jesus’ walk into Jerusalem, his washing of his disciple’s feet, his trial, his sentence, his death and his resurrection as nothing more than a great piece of artwork, with the ability to move us for as long as we choose to stand and admire it. And like any art piece, the Cross-loses its significance as we leave the Church. In order for us to be participants in the Holy Week events and celebrations, we need to understand that to a large degree we hold the paint and the paintbrush in our hands. The picture on the canvas of Holy Week is our picture. We are the crowd, the soldiers, the betrayer, the religious authority, the scared disciples, the self-invested Roman rulers, the mockers and the torturers, and also the ones that Jesus understands and forgives from the cross. In order for us to be able to fully capture the hues of the resurrection light with our paintbrush we have to first understand just how dark and complicated the pictures leading up to the resurrection were. We certainly can never fully comprehend the complexity of all that happened on that first Good Friday. But, we can surely understand the depth of our inability to redeem ourselves from our deep rebellion against God when we hear Jesus saying, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

The invasiveness of sin is such in our lives that we are unable to even see that we are in need of forgiveness and redemption from God. The events of Good Friday continues to expose the extent of our depraved souls, which has the twisted capacity and the willingness to re-define love, peace and justice to suit our immensely selfish desires. Yet, Jesus in His willingness to soak in and forgive all the violence and judgement inflicted on Him shows us God’s deep desire and intention to redeem and to heal us. Every time we suppress the seriousness of our sinful nature, we are in fact rejecting the redemption that God is offering for us at the cross. God knows and understands only too well that there is profound suffering in our sinful nature. He is the one who created us and like only a creator can know his creation, God alone knows the core of our suffering and sin. And in His death, Jesus took that core to His grave and gave us the possibility of a transformed and new life. The gift of that transformed life is God’s intimate presence and healing in our suffering in this life and the hope of His just and holy Kingdom taking root in our lives.

We cannot extricate the violence of Good Friday, nor can we mask the repulsiveness of the Cross, and so it remains that the good news of God’s redemption on the Cross will always be about faith in Him. Christian faith calls us to look at the Cross-as redemptive, not accusatory, it calls us to hope not dejection, and it calls us to forgive and heal.

In one of our hymns we sing:
What language shall I borrow to thank you, dearest friend,
For this your dying sorrow, your pity without end?
Oh, Make me yours forever! And should I faint,
Lord, let me never, never, outlive my love for you.

Indeed, no language on earth can express the gratitude we should express toward God for His love and redemption on the Cross. But more than a thankful heart, God’s desire is for us to receive and nurture that hope which He offers at the Cross. Our hope is in Jesus’ words of forgiveness from the cross, it is in his promise of paradise to us transgressors, it is in his gift of enduring relationships, it is in His experience of abandonment as a reflection of our own sense of lostness, it is hope that makes Him cry out for water from the very people that hung him on the cross, and only hope could have given the strength and endurance to finish all that Jesus had set out to do on the cross. And finally, when Jesus commends his spirit into the Father’s hands, it is with the definitive hope that God will follow through with His redemption and healing.

May God give us the grace to look at the Cross with hope and faith rather than shame and judgement. Amen.