The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Good Friday
April 7, 2023
My God, why have you forsaken me and are so far from my cry and the words of my distress? (Ps 22:1)
In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.
Early one morning not so very long ago, not quite two thousand years past, early in the morning the city of Jerusalem began to stir. Roman soldiers got up, put on their gear, and changed their watch. Religious leaders began their morning prayers. Shepherds had breakfast and began to tend their sheep. Donkeys patiently chewed their straw and babies cried out for their first early morning milk. Craftsmen and laborers went off to their workrooms, and the governor had been up for hours.
Very early in the morning he’d been awoken by his servants; a cadre of local leaders had brought a rural man to be tried for treason. The urgency was astounding. Couldn’t this wait until the morning? the governor thought. But with all the preparations for Passover, perhaps it was just better to get on with it rather than risk unrest in the already tense city of Jerusalem.
On what should have been an ordinary morning, right there, in that moment, nothing made sense. Religious leaders whose laws prohibited murder were calling for death. The governor, the local authority for all things, couldn’t decide what to do. “What even is truth?” he opined. He tried to sidestep the issue using a distraction—surely threatening to release a notorious robber in exchange for this rural fellow from Galilee would get the crowd’s attention, but no, in a surprise reversal, the crowd called for the release of the robber and the execution of the Galilean!
And so the governor ordered the man to be hauled away, beaten, and executed. The soldiers taunted and abused him. They nailed him to a wooden crossbeam alongside the other executions for the day and stood him up, along with the others, in the morning sun atop a hill, waiting for them to tire, to stop breathing from the trauma, to suffocate, and to die.
And that is what happened.
On that morning, the man whom we know as the Son of God, Jesus, the Messiah, was killed by local government officials and religious leaders. Unceremoniously, a normal day’s work for those involved—an annoyance, even. Why was the governor woken up? Why did more people than usual gather round, making the soldiers’ jobs harder, and take longer? Why did it take so long for these ones to die?
Looking back, they began to see how mad, how upended, how chaotic the whole scene was. The hurried trial, the raging anger of the crowd, the most extreme form of judicial sentence for a charge that made no sense. But it was done, and the Galilean had cried out, in the words of the psalm they all knew, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
It’s hard to hear this story, but intellectually it’s easy to draw the lines of good and bad. It’s clear that the political leaders of the day were spiteful, vengeful, greedy, lazy, and just plain evil. It’s clear that there was a lynch mob mentality. It’s clear that Jesus’s friends suffered. And it’s clear the pain that Jesus, innocent victim, received.
It’s easy to analyze and put this in its context: an historical event, the historical event, which in hindsight we can call the triumph of good over evil, of God over sin and death. It’s something that happened in the past, to someone else, involving other people, quite far away. This execution, this murder, this lynching, is an historical aberration, something other.
Except that it wasn’t an aberration-then or now. Jesus was not the only man executed that day. The Romans knew murder, execution, and violence.
And I’d suggest that nothing has changed since then. Violence, degradation, gossip, pettiness, lust, greed, robbery, and yes, even murder are parts of the fabric of our world—two thousand years ago, and today, right now, in New Haven.
While on retreat a few weeks ago I received an early morning text from a concerned parishioner. Had the gunfight on Broadway, right outside the parish offices, hurt anyone here at Christ Church?
Thankfully the answer was no. No one was hurt. A person in one car fired a semiautomatic weapon into another car, shooting out its windows. And no one was hurt. But the windows in the parish office were damaged—little divot holes from glancing bullets—but with a few thousand dollars and several hours’ labor by capable contractors, that damage was repaired—windows good as new.
But death was the intent, of course, as it always is when someone points a gun at someone else.
Someone like the six year old who shot his teacher at school. Someone like the Nashville shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter, the Columbine and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and the Uvalde shooters, who intended to take lives—and as many as possible. Our children carry guns to feel powerful. Our children carry guns because they’re scared. Our children carry guns because they are too young to have brains that are developed enough to judge the consequences of violence—or to believe that death is real, and final.
Let me not blame young people as I single out the most horrific sort of violence we seem to hear about almost daily. Adults kill one another for greed, for lust, out of desperation or just for pride. Lebanon and Israel are firing rockets at one another during Ramadan and Passover. And here during Easter our own nation is involved in the largest shadow war in the European theater in almost a century.
One might be forgiven for thinking that death—even murder—is normal in the fabric of our world. After all, in our foundational narrative, Adam and Eve have two children—Cain and Abel—and right after we read of Adam & Eve’s fall from paradise, the next thing we read is that Cain slew Abel. Murder, right there, at the very beginning of the tale.
And lest we leave it at murder, at death, something that surely other people do, not us good folk who are at church on Good Friday—isn’t every sin, every bit of evil, about death? The greed that leads to stealing or lying? The backstabbing and gossip that does violence, pitting one’s self worth against another’s? The violence of lust that breaks and destroys trust. The violence of addiction that kills the wellbeing of our bodies.
Every act of sin, every act of evil, small or large, is about death. And each crucifies anew.
To paraphrase Taylor Swift, we are all the problem. It’s me. It’s the world we live in.
It might be understandable for us to cry out, in our own day, My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?! Why all the violence? Why the degradation? Why the murder writ large? And why the concomitant forces of racism, White supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, and so many others that catalyze this blood lust?
Where are you, God? Why have you forsaken us!
It is precisely in this act of violence, this lynching, this murder, that we find the truth of love:
God has not forsaken. God has not stepped out of the scene but instead comes among us to accompany us, to love us, to suffer alongside us—and to promise something better, something greater, a life perfect and free of evil and sin and suffering and death.
Remember the other words of Jesus from the cross: as he looks at the two thieves crucified beside him, one says to him “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He believes that Jesus is the one sent—that there is more than the death dealing of the world. And Jesus promises him, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise.”
God comes to offer this life to the sufferers—and to those who have perpetuated suffering. God’s mercy is wasteful and wanton and powerful and saving.
God’s mercy triumphs over all.
And that’s the point of all that we do this Triduum—to recognize, to remember, to tell the story again of the ultimate truth—the truth that Pilate misses but that you and I know: that God loves you and me so much that God comes, personally, to be with us in this hellscape of death that we are living. That God is so unafraid of death and suffering and violence that they are meaningless in the economy of God’s goodness. That Jesus walks with us, cares for us, holds us in his arms, dies with us, until we fully come to know and inhabit the very kingdom of God, where there is no death, or sorrow, but only life everlasting.
God has not forsaken. God is here with us. And even the worst deathdealing we are stuck in cannot survive the blazing heat of God’s perfect love.
Come to the foot of the cross again. Let us lay down our warring, our sins, our violence, and even our fear. And let us pick up the perfect mantle of God’s love, sufficient for today, as we walk with him into the light of everlasting love.
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