Good Friday

 

God’s grace, peace and mercy be with you. My sermon is entitled Last Words and my focus is our Gospel (John 18:1-19:42). Let us pray. Heavenly Father, the psalmist wrote, “I rejoiced when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’” Now that our feet are within your gates, we rejoice to hear your Word. As we listen, may your Spirit enlighten our minds and move our hearts to love deeply as Jesus loved. This we pray to you, Most Holy Trinity. Amen.

If you read the church bulletin, you know that a Lenten reading that I suggested is Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross by Richard John Neuhaus. Neuhaus wrote one chapter on each of the seven last words of the Gospels as Jesus hung from the cross dying. They are “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34); “Truly, I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43); “Woman, behold your son! Behold, your mother!” (John 19:26-27); “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34); “I thirst” (John 19:28); “It is finished” (John 19:30); and “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).

If you were unable to read Neuhaus’ Meditations this year, I suggest you add it to your Lenten “to do” list for 2024. Several times in his book, he mentions a nondenominational megachurch designed with no cross because the pastor did not believe that a suffering Jesus spoke to his congregation. We think otherwise. Throughout his book, Neuhaus advises the reader not to be so hurried to rush to Easter in order to be done with the whole ordeal of Christ’s suffering and death. He writes:

Do not rush to the conquest. Stay a while with this day. Let your heart be broken by the unspeakably bad of this Friday we call good. Some scholars speculate that “Good Friday” comes from “God’s Friday,” as good-bye was originally “God be by you.” But it is just as odd that it should be called God’s Friday, when it is the day when we say good-bye to the glory of God. Wherever its name comes from, let your present moment stay with this day. Stay a while in the eclipse of the light, stay a while with the conquered One. There is time enough for Easter.

With that, let me move to my “Word” from John, “Woman, behold your son. … Behold your mother.” This saying comes not long after the nearly naked Jesus is hung upon the cross. Most of his disciples abandoned Jesus, but his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene stood by faithfully. Only one of the Twelve remained, the one we know as the disciple Jesus loved, also known as the Beloved Disciple.

The Passion Narrative according to John is the only one which mentions this Beloved Disciple. “Why is that?” you wonder. It is because for Matthew, Mark and Luke, he did not play a major role in Jesus’ earthly ministry as did some of the others, such as Peter, Andrew and James. True, he is mentioned in several accounts, including the Transfiguration, the Garden of Gethsemane and a healing, but apart from that, nothing; but for the community or church for whom John wrote, the Beloved Disciple is, of course, significant.

The other person mentioned here is the mother of Jesus. She plays no significant role in John’s Gospel other than the fact that she intervened with Jesus at the Wedding at Cana, and only because they ran out of wine. In fact, she played no role at all once Jesus began his public ministry.

Prior to this Word, John mentioned three groups present at the Crucifixion: the chief priests, the soldiers and this group. The first two groups mocked Jesus in their own way. The chief priests complained about the inscription Pilate ordered placed above Jesus’ head. The soldiers, of course, nailed Jesus to the cross, and gambled for his garments and seamless tunic. Finally, the women and the Beloved Disciple were there not to mock, but rather simply to be with Jesus, and as we shall see, for a greater purpose that affects us even today

Now, it is interesting to note that the Synoptic Evangelists make no mention of the mother of Jesus present at the crucifixion. Luke mentions no women by name. Mark and Matthew both list Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joses. The former lists Salome, and the latter the mother of the sons of Zebedee. Again, you must wonder, why the discrepancy, and why John included Mary if she played no role in Jesus’ public ministry. Who is she for John the Beloved Disciple and for his community? To help understand that, let’s put this into perspective.

Perspective is the science of optics. It comes to us from the Latin word perspectus which means clearly perceived. Its roots are per meaning through or forward and specere meaning to look at or observe. Eventually, it came to be understood as one’s mental outlook or the lens through which we see.

When we look at Mary, Mother of Jesus, Mother of God, we see her from a perspective removed by 2,000 years, 6,000 miles and countless other factors, including language, culture and religion. Our view of her, like our view of anyone or anything, is biased. Even if we knew her as we know family members and old friends, we would still have our own unique perspective of Mary. The early Church, as a universal body and as individual congregations, had various views of Mary. She was an historical person and she is a symbolic person. Mariology, that is, the theology of Mary, developed over centuries, but always has been and is closely related to Christology. To know Mary is to know Christ and vice-versa. Right now, however, I am more interested in who Mary is as a symbolic person.

Keep in mind when you read the Gospel of John or any book of the Bible, you should first ask why this author presented a person or a teaching as it was originally written. What inspired John to include this brief moment, this Word, into his account of Jesus’ crucifixion? As many people are, Mary was a symbol of something larger. Over time, historical people – Mother Teresa, George Washington, Jackie Robinson or Joe Namath – become symbolic because of a certain trait, whether it is compassion, leadership or confidence or a combination of many other things. What did Mary symbolize for John and his community?

Throughout the history of the Church, Saints John Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory, Augustine and others wrote of who Mary symbolized for the church in whatever century they lived. Indeed, it is important to address her as a figure for who we are now, and to a greater degree, we should seek to understand who Jesus is for us today.

For centuries, much has been written of Jesus’ concern for his mother’s material welfare so that he placed her into John’s hands to care for her. But notice that there is no Scriptural reference of John’s home or earthly origins, and the only people in this Gospel that are interested in the earthly origins of Jesus are the grumbling unbelievers who witnessed the multiplication of loaves (6:42).

The Jesus of John’s Gospel had a greater concern for the spiritual welfare of the community of believers he was leaving behind than the material welfare of his mother. Recall in chapter 17, that Jesus prayed for the people his Father gave to him. He did not pray for the world, but for his disciples and for those who would come to believe in Him through them (6:20). Those later believers included people who had a familial or fraternal relationship with Jesus, but not necessarily a spiritual one. There were people who knew who Jesus was, but did not believe in him as did his original disciples. All of these early and late disciples became the Church, the New Israel.

His mother was a symbol of this New Israel. She was denied her role as a disciple at Cana because Jesus’ hour had not yet come. Now that it arrived, Jesus gave her the role as mother of the Beloved Disciple. For members of the Community of the Beloved Disciple, John was regarded as highly as most people today regard the Mother of God. So, her presence at the cross was important for John’s community because when she becomes mother of this Beloved Disciple, he becomes a “blood” brother of Jesus through the spoken Word of the Lord. In short, what John wrote in one verse was a way of saying that one related to Jesus by flesh (his mother) became related to Jesus by the Spirit (a member of the ideal discipleship) because of the Word He spoke.

Why did John go through so much pain to include Mary and John at the Cross when the other Evangelists did not? Why did the Beloved Disciples include this Word into his Passion Narrative? Because his community struggled with the issue of how a member of Jesus’ natural family could become a member of his spiritual family, of the Church. How could people who did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah while he lived with them and among them now show up at the church door and join them in prayerful worship?

Jesus had a human family like you do. I have dozens of cousins whom I love very much, but they do not worship with me. My relationship with most of them is genetic or historical, but not spiritual. As preacher and hearers, we have a spiritual relationship even though we are not blood relatives. We may not be bound by blood, but in John’s eyes, we are bound by the Holy Spirit even more tightly than family ties.

The Word of Jesus brought together his Beloved Disciple John and Mary, who is related to Jesus physically, but during his public ministry appeared only when she and Jesus’ brothers sought to seize him because they heard people saying he was out of his mind (Mark 6:21, 31-32). At this, Jesus looked at the people around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother” (6:34-35). This must have left the original members of the Community of the Beloved Disciple and his readers with the impression that the natural family is separate from the spiritual family of disciples. Maybe some of them thought that since they were now members of this Community, they should no longer have a relationship with people who did not believe as they did. They needed to know that Jesus’ Word bought Mary and John, both who had a relationship with him, together as mother and son.

This relationship made not only John, but all followers of Jesus true brothers and sisters of Christ. For John’s community, this relationship enlarged Christian discipleship in a significant way as a sign that it would grow and contain many diverse backgrounds. It also makes the final Word in John intelligible to us for after Jesus accomplished this, it was finished. The new birth of the people of God in the messianic age was completed by Jesus before he died on the Cross as the Son of God.

What does this have to do with us? What is my perspective not only of Jesus and Mary and the Beloved Disciple standing around the Cross? More importantly, what is my perspective of my brothers and sisters in this church? On Good Friday, we are all onlookers present at the Cross simply to offer comfort to our Lord. Every one of us is brother and sister of Jesus Christ not because of what we think or say or do, but because on the Cross before He died, Jesus spoke the Word and made it happen. The rub for us is do we resemble the Community of the Beloved Disciple all the time? Do we look and feel like family all the time?

We entered the world as sinners. Baptism has freed us from sin. Confession and Absolution continually works to free us from sin. Taking and consuming the Body and Blood of Christ makes us one with Him and one another. Friends, take a moment to look around. Look at the people gathered here tonight. Think of the people who are not here tonight, but hopefully, will be on Sunday or someday. And now, call to mind the Word of Christ: Behold, your son. Behold, your mother. Behold, your brother and sister, your spiritual family through Christ’s blood and Spirit. Now, that it is finished, may the peace of God that surpasses all understanding keep your minds and hearts in Christ Jesus. Amen.