Good Friday Emmanuel

Sermon preached on Good Friday, April 10, 2020 for St. Thomas', Bath on-line worship:  Isaiah 52:13--53:12. Hebrews 4:14-15, 5:7-9; John 18:1--19:42

He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity . . . he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases. (Isaiah)

          Today we meet Isaiah’s “Man of Suffering,” or, in other translations, “the Man of Sorrows.”  This Man suffers and sorrows not of his own account but on behalf of suffering and sorrowing humanity.  He has borne, Isaiah proclaims, our suffering, our infirmities, our diseases, our sorrows, and, yes, our sin.

          It is obvious that we need this Man of suffering and sorrow on this particular Good Friday, when the world is caught in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic.  We are not all of us suffering or sorrowful.  Most of us are just disrupted, if not also anxious, about what could be for us, for loved ones with whom we cannot share physical presence.  But we know of the suffering and sorrows of so many around the world, and if we think on them, pray for them, as we must, it is almost too much to bear.

          Some might say, “No, this is not the Man we need.”  We need the Man who can get us out of this with healing and strength and victory over this virus.  The last thing we need is submission and weakness.

          But Christianity is not that kind of religion.  You might think it is if you only experience Easter.  You might think so even if you remember Good Friday and celebrate Easter as the undoing of all this horror, the healing of the Man of suffering, the resurrection of the Man of sorrow.

          But that is not how it works.  We live in a perpetual cycle of suffering and healing, of sorrow and joy, of death and resurrection.  That is why the risen Jesus carries the wounds on his hands and feet and side.  He does not put Good Friday behind him; he carries Good Friday with him.

          And thank God for that, because we live so often in a Good Friday world and we need the Man, the God, who can meet us in our suffering, who can meet us in our sorrow, who can meet us in our sin, because only in this meeting can we know the One we call Emmanuel, “God with us.”

          We can trust Emmanuel, God with us, to be, in the language of the Hebrews reading, our great and eternal high priest, who has triumphed with grace and mercy over the need for sacrifice, the kind of sacrifice that must be performed over and over and over again, ad infinitum, because we can never be sure if this God will stay on our side.  But Jesus, Emmanuel, is this God, whose word of mercy is not conditional but eternal.

          It is Emmanuel, God with us, the Man of suffering, the Man of sorrows, who is there on the cross for us, drawing the whole world into the embrace of his outstretched arms, as he promised he would.  This drawing in, gathering in, to the crucified arms is not something we need hope for, because it just is.

          But Jesus from the cross does not stop there, being Emmanuel. God with us, God for us.  He also calls us to be there for one another.  He sees his mother, who in John’s Gospel is never named, on the ground below, no doubt in her own suffering and sorrow, and near her that mysterious, unnamed disciple whom we are told “Jesus loved.”  That these two figures are unnamed was a very deliberate act on the Gospel writer’s part.  They are unnamed so that we can understand that they are us.  And what does Jesus do for them and for us?

“Woman, behold your son.”  And to the disciple whom he loved, “Here is your mother.”

          In this act, the followers of Jesus become the family of Jesus, related not by blood, but by grace, so that all of us are called into community as mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters of each other.  In essence, in establishing this new relationship between his mother and the disciple whom he loved, Jesus, from the cross, is founding the church.

          Today we gaze in awe at the mystery that the Man of suffering, the Man of sorrow, our great high priest, is Emmanuel, God with us, God for us.  This great truth is behind the ancient belief that Jesus was conceived and died on the same day.

          And we receive our calling to be that—the loving and graceful presence of God—for one another, in a community that knows suffering and healing, sorrow and joy, death and life in the mystery of these three days, and in the mystery of all life.