God's Response (Good Friday 2025)

This world can be an awful place. A place of pain and suffering. A place of injustice and oppression. A place where human beings perpetrate unthinkable acts of violence against one another. The gospel we just heard, the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, enters one of these malignant places. A place of betrayal and denial. Of scapegoating and bullying. Of torture and execution. It is an account where the sin of world, the evil of which humans are capable, is on full display. “For this I was born and for this I came into the world,” says Jesus to Pilate. “To testify to the truth.” And that truth includes the worst of our world, and the suffering caused by human sin. Our faith does not allow us to stay on the surface of our lives in willful blindness or with some sort of naïve optimism; no, it forces us to go deep. To confront the darkness.

For those of us who like to think that humanity is not so bad, this is an unnerving story, astonishing yet entirely credible. Credible, sadly, because it is one of many such stories. We don’t need to go back in time. Think of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has spent the last month in a notorious prison in El Salvador after he was mistakenly deported from Maryland, with both the American and El Salvadoran governments refusing to take action to return him. Or think of the coordinated assaults of South Sudanese militants on the Zamzam refugee camp in Darfur just this week, killing hundreds of innocent people, including the entire remaining medical staff. The world can be a place of deep shadow.

How does God respond to evil in our world? What is the divine response to human sin and suffering, to oppression and violence? And what should our response be?

One could imagine different ways that God could respond to the depravity of our world. One response could be indifference: let them fight it out. Another could be to blow up the whole human project gone wrong. God could condemn us, could punish us, could remove our ability to choose. All these, one could imagine.

Thankfully, we haven’t been left to our imaginations. Jesus, the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, came into our world to testify to the truth, to reveal God to us, to make God known. And the place where God is made known to us most fully is on the cross. John’s gospel tells us that Good Friday is an act of love, that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that there is no greater love than to give one’s life for the sake of others.

Good Friday tells us that God’s response to the sin of the world is to enter fully into it. Not to condemn the darkness of our world from afar, but to step into it, and to step into it not as the avenger or destroyer, nor as the one who exercises power, not even as an arbitrator, but as the one who suffers, as the one who is oppressed, as the one who is victimized. That’s what we’re meant to see when we behold God the Son on the cross. It’s as if God is saying to us, when you do this to each other, you do this to me. So for God’s sake, stop. 

In the gospel we just heard, the veil is stripped away and the heart of God is revealed. We see God’s response to the sin of our world. In Jesus, we see a God who suffers, who loves, who forgives, who dies. This is what our redemption cost God. Our faith is not rooted in a facile triumphalism. In the words of Leonard Cohen, it’s a cold and it’s a broken “Hallelujah.”

This is how God responds to, and on the third day, overcomes, the sin of the world. What should our response be?

It is good for us to note that when God enters the darkness, God takes the side of the vulnerable, the victimized and the violated every time. When we turn our backs on those who are maligned, those who suffer, those who are oppressed, we turn our backs on Jesus. When we stand with them, Jesus stands with us.

Yet we can still experience an overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of suffering and injustice. Sometimes we are victims, more often we are witnesses, of evil and oppression that we cannot prevent or control. We can be overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness in the face of tragedies great and small, as well as in our own personal setbacks. Many of you have spoken to me of your feelings of powerlessness in the face of the uncertainties and the tragic events of our world in recent times.

This feeling too, is part of the story of Good Friday.

“Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” There too was, John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. Think of them for a moment, think in particular of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Surely their suffering, surely her suffering was profound. These were people who loved Jesus, and when someone you love suffers, you suffer too, we know that. But think also of the overwhelming sense of powerlessness, of helplessness that they must have felt as Jesus was nailed to cross by the soldiers. There was no way they could challenge the full might of the Roman army to prevent what was happening. It must have been tempting to turn away.

But they didn’t turn away. They drew near, they showed up, they stayed, when many others didn’t. Peter was one of those who turned away. When Peter had been asked just a few hours earlier whether he was one of Jesus’ disciples, he had denied it, with an emphatic “I am not”. But the women, and the beloved disciple, they showed up, they stayed, they stood near the cross.

And Jesus sees them. And loves them.

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.”

Do you remember what we talked about last night? On the night before his death, after the meal, after the washing of the feet, with his last teaching opportunity, Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment. “Love one another. As I have loved you, you are to love one another.”

On the cross, with his last breath, Jesus breathes life into this new commandment, making it as real and as concrete and as practical as can be:

“Woman here is your son.”  And to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”  And John took Mary into his own home”, and cared for her, for the next 30 years.

After this, we are told, Jesus knew that all was now finished. Having loved his own who were in the world, he had loved them to the end. Now, they would love one another, as he had loved them.

“It is finished,” he said. Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

God’s response to the sin of the world, to the malignance that oppresses our lives, is to enter into it fully, to stand with those who are oppressed, to suffer, to forgive and to love. On Good Friday, as Jesus’ body lies in the tomb, it is still an open question as to whether this will be enough to overcome what is evil in the world and to redeem humanity. By day’s end Friday, it’s not looking so good, but on the third day we will look again.

For us, it’s all a bit overwhelming. It would be easier to ignore or to look away. There is only so much we can do, and only so much we can change or prevent. But like Mary and John, even when overwhelmed by the sin of the world, we can show up. We can always choose when and where we show up, and with whom we will stand. And when we stand with those who are oppressed, those who are marginalized, those who suffer, know that we stand with Jesus.

Know also that, though it can certainly feel like it at times, we are never really powerless. Like Mary and John, even in life’s most difficult circumstances, we can always choose to love one another. And on the third day when we do look again, we will discover anew that there is nothing more powerful than love.

Amen.

Homily: Good Friday April 18 2025, Trinity Ottawa

Readings: John 18 & 19

Image by Claudio Ungari