Our Representative: A Homily for Good Friday

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on Good Friday, 29 March, 2024.  

Readings for this day:  Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

What would our service and our church look like on this day to someone who were to experience Christian worship for the first time?  What conclusions would that person draw about our faith?

Recently in the Anglican Digest, an American bishop, the Rt. Rev. Brian Burgess, described an old childhood friend who had reached out to him and wanted to reunite on the weekend of Easter, the Triduum as we call it.   Since the Bishop could not take time off work, he invited his old friend to come and visit him at church, and so his friend, who was totally unfamiliar with Christianity, arrived at a Good Friday service to find the church “stripped, cold, and bare”.

Bishop Burgess wrote that he was grateful that his friend came on this particular day in the church year.

“Now if I had pick one service, one observance of our Calendar that speaks to those who are unchurched and who have quite difficult career paths to navigate, I would choose Good Friday.   I say that because we lose sight of the essence of Easter when we have no concept of what it is we are being saved from.   We can become distracted from the cross of Christ.  … The goal of our Christian lives is our death and resurrection in Jesus Christ.”

Notice that the Bishop did not write, “the death and resurrection in Jesus Christ”.    He is surely correct to say “our death and resurrection in Jesus Christ” because if today, Good Friday, is about what happens to Jesus on the cross, then it is also about us.   How exactly we are involved is a mystery to be sure.  Theologians speak of how the crucifixion is about Jesus atoning for our sins, but how this happens is a mystery which no one theology of atonement can satisfactorily explain.

The American priest and theologian Fleming Rutledge, whose writings I quoted frequently during Epiphany this year, has written a massive and learned book on The Crucifixion which is essential reading.   This year as I reread it, one passage stayed with me.  Rutledge mentions that the novelist Joseph Mitchell, who was himself a Christian, described a last conversation with her sister at her deathbed.   His sister asked him “what does Jesus’ death on the cross a long time ago have to do with my sins now?”   Mitchell recalled how he struggled to find words, and finally he said “Somehow, he was our representative” (Rutledge 6-7).

He was our representative.  Our second reading from Hebrews might lead us to doubt that, since it stresses Christ’s reverent obedience and submission to God’s will.    But the essential thing the author of Hebrews and Joseph Mitchell agree on is that Christ is our representative, in the same way that a priest represents his or her congregation.     And, on the cross, Jesus represents us and our sinfulness in a way that we cannot.

What can I say about sinfulness that the world does not already teach us?   Every day we learn that sinfulness is both enormous and seemingly intractable.    The UN tries to end the war in Gaza, and yet the various sides refuse a ceasefire for their own reasons, and millions slide into starvation.   Missiles crash into apartment blocks in Ukraine, and yet politicians talk about freezing the conflict rather than solving it.   Homelessness and gross disparities in wealth increase in our prosperous country, and yet no party seems to have any real answer.

The cross teaches us that these are our problems are sin, sin originating from within the human heat, for it was humans, seemingly righteous humans, political humans, that nailed Jesus to the cross.    The cross teaches us that without God, sin has no definitive answer.  

It is popular for many in our church today to see the cross as an instrument of political oppression, that Christ is the victim of this oppression, and that we are called to resist oppression and embrace a vision of social justice.   Indeed, God’s call is a call of social justice, for Jesus said at the start of his ministry that the kingdom of God has come near.    But, we can only enter the kingdom of God through the cross, for unless we healed of our sin, our attempts at justice will always just be social projects, subject to the whims and trends of the world.

Tomorrow night, at St Luke’s, we will witness a baptism, and be reminded that through baptism we share in Christ’s death as we die to our sins and rise with Christ, regaining what was always dreamed for us in the heart and mind of God.   Today, we can see that same salvation as we look to the cross, the place where we are healed and transformed.

I leave the last word to that great Anglican poetic and mystic, John Donne, who wrote:

“We think that Paradise and Calvarie,

Christ’s Crosse and Adam’s tree, stood in one place.

Look, Lord, and finde both Adams met in me;

As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,

May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.”