Going Deep. (Good Friday)

It is easy for our faith and our worship to remain on the surface. We sing uplifting songs, we talk about love, we pray to God when it’s convenient. Good Friday invites us to go deeper. Good Friday forces us to go deeper, to confront pain and suffering, to spend time in the darkness of our world and to consider whether our faith has the power to sustain us in the painful places of our lives.

We tend to live much of our lives on the surface. “Hi, how are you? Fine thanks. Nice weather today. How about those Senators?” I get it. Staying on the surface is safe, it’s comfortable. But there is so much more going on in our lives. Good Friday asks us to go deeper.

When we do go deeper, we will encounter things of great joy and beauty. Yet we will surely also encounter great pain and suffering. And we know that, too often, that pain and suffering are caused by the way we treat one another, as individuals and as a society.

The gospel we just heard is “The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ”. The word “Passion” means suffering. This account of Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion takes the pain that we inflict on one another and makes it visible for all to see in the suffering of this one human being. The early church turned to the text from Isaiah that we just heard in its attempt to make sense of the crucifixion, both as a prophecy and as a reflection on Jesus’ death. In it, we are told that Jesus bore the sin of many. And in the passion gospel that we just heard, this is literally true. Judas betrayed him. Peter denied him. His disciples abandoned him. The authorities plotted against him. The soldiers abused him with violence. Pilate handed him over. The criminals mocked him. The bystanders did nothing.

He was despised, rejected and held of no account. On the cross, in pain and suffering, he bore the sins of many.

This is, first of all, a human story. Though our own experiences may not be as public, perhaps not as extreme as Jesus’ execution, each one of us has experienced the consequences of human sin. Whether as victim or as perpetrator, whether first-hand or as suffered by those we love, we know what it is to be despised, rejected and held of no account. We know the hurt of betrayal, denial, abandonment, abuse, and mocking. There is a truth about humanity here, one that we are often reluctant to talk about: we, in the way we treat one another, cause great pain and suffering. It’s rarely as visible as Jesus’ crucifixion - but it’s there, particularly when we dare to go deep.  We might like to think that we’re ok, or that we’re not so bad, or that it’s them not us, but deep down we know that Jesus’ story, though extreme, is by no means an isolated account. It is a very human story. It is communal, and it is personal.

Yet, this human story is also God’s story. We believe that Jesus is God incarnate, God in the flesh, the very Creator of the world in human form. And so, the one who was hung from a cross was not only very human, but also very God. This narrative, the passion and cross of Christ, is deeply revelatory of who God is, what God is like and of God’s relationship with us. Not only is there truth about humanity here, but there is truth about God. Jesus says as much to Pilate. “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”

What we see on the cross is not simply the suffering of the man Jesus who bore the sins of many, but the suffering of the triune God who bears the sin of the world.

We all know, each in our imperfect way, what it means to love.  And that means we all know or can imagine, at least in some measure, how painful it is to be rejected by the ones we love, and how much we suffer when we see the suffering of those that we love.  We can’t love without being hurt, without being open to pain and sorrow.

How much more then must God, who is love, and created us out of love, how much more must God suffer and endure pain as a result of the sin and oppression of our world.  In the course of human history, with its war and violence and genocides, in the course of our own personal histories, imagine how much pain and suffering a God who loves us has had to endure.

On the cross this is all made visible for us. Jesus, on the cross, is the God who loves us. We often say that God loves us; yet on the cross we get to see the depth of that love.  To borrow the words of Leonard Cohen, “love is not a victory march; it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

On the cross, Jesus bears the sins of many, indeed the sin of the world. That sin threatens to crush us, to squash our spirit, to destroy our faith. That sin can cause us to lash out, individually and institutionally, to cry out for vengeance, to return violence for violence and evil for evil. Yet on the cross, Jesus shows us another way. He absorbs the violence, endures the pain, bears the sin without returning it in kind. Even from the cross, he cares for his mother, forgives his tormentors, and gives hope to a condemned man. Though his body was crushed, his spirit he commends into the hands of his Father. Even on the cross, Jesus places his trust in God.

Is this trust misplaced? The grace that Jesus reveals, even on the cross, are these simply the noble gestures of a dying man, or are they for us a sign of something more? By 3pm on the Friday, as the skies grow dark and Jesus’ body goes limp, it looks like the forces of darkness have prevailed. The God-man on the cross, has responded to the sin of the world not with vengeance nor condemnation but with love, mercy, forgiveness and grace. But on Friday it appears quite certain that God’s grace is not enough to overcome the sin of the world.

And sometimes, that’s how we feel too. Life can be hard, brutally hard at times. One of the reasons we call this Friday ‘Good’ is because it affirms for us that’s ok to feel this way sometimes, that there can indeed be pain in our lives that makes it oh so difficult to trust God and to cling to hope. Jesus knows this better than anyone else. As the letter to the Hebrews puts it “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect as been tested as we are.”

There are days when it appears that God’s grace is not enough to overcome the sin of the world. But even on those days, even on Good Friday, we know that Easter is coming. And that the One who raised Jesus from the dead surely has the power to also raise each one of us to new life. Easter is our promise and assurance that grace, mercy, compassion, forgiveness and love will prevail over betrayal, denial, rejection, violence, abuse and even death. That dawn is coming and this darkness too will pass. That weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.

And so, to quote Hebrews once more, “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we might receive mercy and find grace to help in times of need.”

Amen.

Good Friday. April 3 2026. Trinity

Readings: Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4.14-16, 5.7-9; John 18 & 19