Good Friday (Fr. Roberts)

There is a song by a band called Brand New called Jesus Christ. He sings, "Well Jesus Christ, I'm alone again. So what did you do those three days you were dead? 'Cause this problem's gonna last more than the weekend." A man talking to God the way you talk to someone who owes you an explanation. I think it is more honest than most of what gets said on Good Friday. We know the story. Christ died for our sins. We have heard it so many times it feels hollow. For many of us there is a distance between knowing this and feeling it. We hear "Christ died for your sins" and we nod. Yes. I am bad. He did the thing. Now I get to live forever. But that solves a future problem. And tonight we still feel dry.

Afraid. Alone.

The singer is right. These problems will last more than the weekend.

I often wonder if I tend to prefer the living Christ. The Christ who spat in the dirt and pressed mud on a blind man's eyes and said, Go wash.

The man came back seeing for the first time in his life. The Christ who said to a man who had not stood on his own legs in thirty-eight years: Stand up. Take your mat. Walk. And the man walked. The Christ who stood outside a sealed tomb and shouted his dead friend's name into the darkness. Lazarus came stumbling out into the daylight, still wrapped in his grave clothes. The Christ who broke five loaves and two fish into enough food for five thousand. The Christ who looked up into a sycamore tree and saw a man everybody else despised and said: Come down. I am coming to your house today.

That Christ I understand. He sees the wreckage and he repairs it. Blindness, paralysis, death, hunger, loneliness. He enters each one and

heals it. And if he had just kept doing that, kept walking through villages, opening eyes, raising the dead, calling the despised down from their hiding places, we would follow him anywhere. That is a Christ we can use. A Christ who solves our problems in terms we understand.

But that Christ is dead. The healer is on the cross. The fixing has stopped.

So let us stay at the cross. Let us look at what is actually happening here, because we have been telling this story for so long we may have stopped seeing it.

Before he dies, a Roman governor stares at him, scourged, crowned with thorns, blood running into his eyes. Jesus has just told him: I came into the world to bear witness to the truth. Pilate looks at him and asks, What is truth?

He does not recognize what is standing in front of him. Truth is not a concept. It is not a position or a platform or a side to defend. It is right here, bleeding. But it does not look like power. It does not look like Caesar. It looks like a man who has given everything away.

So Pilate turns to the crowd and says, Ecce homo. Here is the man. He means it as contempt. Look at this wretch.

The chief priests look at him. Their Messiah. The fulfillment of everything their scriptures had been straining toward. And they say: Crucify him. Pilate pushes back. Shall I crucify your king? And they answer: We have no king but Caesar. The first principle of their faith, traded in a single sentence to destroy the one their own God had sent.

But Pilate does not know what he is saying. Here is the man. Those words reach further back than Rome.

John opens his gospel the same way Genesis opens its. The same words. In the beginning. And through that Word all things were made. And on the sixth day of creation God said: Let us make man in our image. He formed Adam from dust and breathed into him and Adam became alive. That project, the making of a human being in the image of God, is the story of the entire Bible. Adam was the first draft. And Adam grasped.

He reached for what was not given. He chose himself over his God. And death entered through that choice. And every generation since has been repeating it.

Israel was the long revision.

And now. On a Friday. The sixth day. The day God made man. The Word through whom all things were created hangs on a cross outside a city wall. God finishes making man. Not by molding clay. By dying.

And man is once again confronted with a tree. A tree. And its fruit.

He has carried the wood of his own sacrifice to the hilltop, like Isaac climbing Moriah with the kindling on his back, asking his father: Where is the lamb? Here is the lamb. The priests in the Temple are slaughtering the Passover lambs at this very hour. And here is the Lamb of God, wearing one seamless garment woven from top to bottom in a single piece. A priest's garment. The priest and the offering are the same person.

And he says: I thirst. They lift a sponge of sour wine to his mouth on a branch of hyssop, the same plant that struck the doorposts in Egypt the night the firstborn died and the slaves went free. He drinks. Not because the suffering is unbearable. Because he has one word left to say. And he will not let his body's collapse steal it from his mouth.

It is finished.

Not: it is over. Not: the suffering can finally stop and we can all go home. The work is complete. God set out to make a human being in his image. And here, on this cross, in this wrecked and bleeding body that will not save itself: here is the man. The finished man. The only one who ever lived. Not grasping. Not clinging. Not clawing for power or survival. Giving. All the way down. To the bottom. To death.

This is what we were made to be.

But God does not leave it as an example. Watch what he does. He looks down from the cross at his mother and at the disciple beside her. And he says to her: Woman, behold your son. And to the disciple: Behold your mother. And from that hour the disciple takes her into his own home.

His last act before giving up his life is to give people to each other. To say: you belong to one another now. Care for each other the way I have cared for you.

Then the breath goes out. The Spirit is handed over. And a soldier puts a lance through his side. Blood and water pour from the wound. The wound becomes a fountain. From his opened side pours the life of every community that will ever gather at his table. The water of baptism. The blood of the cup. The Church is born here. Not in a boardroom, not on a platform, not in an argument. Here. Where a body is torn open and given.

What God began in a garden with dust and breath, he completes on a cross with blood and Spirit. In Genesis God breathed into Adam and one man came alive. On the cross God breathes out through his Son and a people comes alive. The same breath that made the first man now fills us. Not so that we can admire what Christ has done. So that we can live the way he lived.

The singer wants to know what Christ did those three days he was dead.

He descended. All the way down. Past every grave. Into the darkness where the first man had been waiting since the foundation of the world. He went searching for Adam the way a shepherd searches for a lost sheep. The first draft. The one who grasped. The one who chose himself over his God and broke the world. And Christ went to him. Not as judge. He went the way you go to someone you have been looking for since before they were born. He took him by the hand. And he said: Awake, sleeper. Rise. I did not make you for this.

There is nowhere we can fall where he has not already been. No darkness he has not entered. No death he has not descended into and broken open from the inside.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.

The seed fell into the ground. And it bore much fruit. The living Christ I prefer, the one who touched the blind and fed the hungry and called the despised down from their hiding places, that Christ is not gone. He is multiplied. That is the whole point. While we wait for him, we are not waiting idle. We are the fixing. We are his hands now, and his breath is in our lungs.

The loneliness will persist. The fear will come back. The dryness will return. These are real, and the cross does not pretend otherwise.

What is truth?

It is embodied. Truth is a life poured out. Not talked about. Not fought over with empty words. It is the giving of yourself to another. To all others. It is showing up for the ones the world has written off. It is serving, caring, and praying for your enemies. It is letting go every earthly thing you are clutching, money, status, control, the need to be right, and holding nothing back. Every drop. The way Jesus held nothing back.

What is truth?

We have been looking at him all night.