We have this evening walked through the drama of the Passion of Christ together. The slow march of Christ’s passion began on Palm Sunday when he was borne into the holy city on the wave of the people’s expectations of a Messiah who would liberate them from Roman rule and oppression. Tonight, we have been with him in his subsequent agony in the garden of Gethsemane. The name Gethsemane means “the Olive Press” – the place where the savoury fruit is crushed to extract its precious oils. In the garden, Jesus too is pressed under the great burden of the world’s Sin; His own precious oil extracted, the dusty earth absorbing His blood mingled with sweat. We have been with Him as he willingly offered his cheek to his betrayer’s kiss (it is the ones closest to us who have the greatest capacity to betray us). We have been with Him as His friend’s abandoned Him in His greatest hour of need. We have sat in the courtroom with Him, witnessing as the innocent was accused of blasphemy, treason, and condemned to die the worst possible kind of execution the human mind has ever conjured up – the grisly, horrific, and shameful death of crucifixion. Mocked, abused, and beaten to within an inch of His life, we have watched as He was made to carry the very instrument of his own death – like one who fumbles with their own noose or puts live rounds into a gun whose trigger they know will be pulled with themselves in the sights.
There are three actors in the Apocalyptic Drama of Good Friday.
God in Christ is the primary protagonist in the events of Good Friday. But there are two other actors in this drama. Us – that is, humanity – and that thorny Christian term, Sin.
Contrary to the popular conception of sin as misdeeds or wrongful acts committed by individuals, the New Testament writers paint a picture of Sin as a cosmic enslaving power perpetually opposed to God that disrupts, distorts, and deceives God’s good creation. If Christ is the protagonist, then Sin is the antagonist in the drama. Sin, as Jesus put it, is “the strong man” (Mark 3:27) who takes hostages into his house and binds them in a stranglehold they are powerless to free themselves from. And yet, like the thirty silver coins promised to Judas Iscariot, we mistake that death grip for a sweet caress like a prisoner in the throes of Stockholm syndrome.
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the best-selling epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings, understood this conception of Sin well when he made the Ring of Power the alluring weapon of the Satanic figure in Middle Earth, the dark Lord Sauron. The characters in Middle Earth are constantly tempted to use the one ring, not for evil purposes but to bring about good. This desire for power to do good, ultimately leads the great warrior Boromir to betray his friends and attempt to seize the ring for Himself. Sin promises to make us relevant; it promises to make us spectacular; it promises to make us powerful. Sin promises us power, but instead it always seizes power from us and enslaves us.
Power is an ever-present temptation for the Church. On a cold January morning in 2016, a New York property tycoon in a blue suit with a red tie, stood on the stage of an auditorium at a small Christian college in Iowa to state his case for becoming the next President of the United States. He ultimately won over his Christian audience with the promise of power; saying:
“Christianity will have power. If I’m there [in the White House] you’re going to have plenty of power.” - Donald Trump
However, Christian power - the power of the Holy Spirit – is not a political power, it is not a power that garners glory, it is a power that finds its source in the Cross of Jesus, it is the power of self-giving unconditional love, the power of forgiveness, the power of grace.
On the Cross of Jesus Christ, God has waged war on the power of Sin, the antagonist of Good Friday.
So, what is our part in the story – are we simply the neutral extras in the background of this great cosmic battle between Christ and the Devil?
To all intents and purposes we are the battleground on which this war is waged. The human heart is the arena and the prize of this battle. Both sides attempting to win it over. Sin would use us as agents of evil, human shields on the front line of the offensive, all of us embroiled in its schemes. And God in Christ is like the SWAT team sent in to take out the terror of Sin and liberate the hostages. Both powers are at work in us. As the Russian Soviet dissident and writer, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn lamented,
“the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” - The Gulag Archipelago
We are all too often complicit in Sin’s schemes, we are all of us “drawn to the power of the ring”, the power that Sin promises. If the testimony of the last few centuries - the bloodiest and most brutal known to humankind – is anything to go by, it is not simply individuals, but whole groups, corporations, and governments that are enslaved to Sin.
In the third year of the American Civil war, President Abraham Lincoln declared that “all persons held as slaves … are, and henceforward shall be, free.” But for the best part of the next century, some 4000 formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants were tortured and executed at the hands of white mobs. But these mobs weren’t exceptionally evil people, they were everyday people like you and me, many of them faithful Christians no less. They produced postcards with images of lynchings, sold for 25 cents entitled, “Token of a Great Day.”
When Thomas Brooks was lynched in Tennessee in 1915 a local newspaper wrote,
"Hundreds of Kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope.... Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of county schools the day's routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man."
Women and children were there… all of us are embroiled in Sin’s schemes.
Richard Sonnenfeldt, the chief interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, recalled that the chief Nazi’s on trial – those tasked with implementing the Fuhrer’s “final solution”, Men capable of great evil – were the kinds of ordinary people you might meet on the street. The crowds who just a week earlier had lauded Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, are the some ones to shout “Crucify Him!”
God does not desire His Son to be crucified… but we do.
There is something that has infested every human heart with a propensity towards evil that we cannot rid ourselves of, and yet desperately needs to be eradicated.
As St Augustine, the 5th century north African Bishop of Hippo once wrote,
“Do not grieve or complain that you were born in a time when you can no longer see God in the flesh, for as he says ‘Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me.’”
On the Cross, Jesus becomes the least of us all. Jesus is the victim of our brutality, our complicity in Sin’s power. Jesus is the one who hangs from the lynching tree, the one who suffocates in the gas chamber, the one we pinned up like an animal to die.
We celebrate Good Friday as the wake-up call to a humanity that has fallen prey to the power of Sin, the antagonist in the drama.
But the protagonist of this story, the hero in this drama, will not let the unholy Trinity of Sin, Death and the Devil, have the final word. Sin does not have the final word. Jesus does.
The four Gospels in the Christian Scriptures spend a great deal of time gearing up to and dwelling on Good Friday. They spent a lot less time on the Resurrection. Matthew and Luke each dedicate just one chapter to the Resurrection, John two out of 21. Mark also dedicates one chapter to the resurrection, but a third of his gospel is about the Passion of Christ.Why spend so much time and attention, foretelling and then telling of the death of Jesus on the cross? Sure, the emphasis could be on resurrection. However, “The cross”, Paul says “is a stumbling block” – its given so much attention because it is the most difficult thing to make sense of - could this really be the Creator hanging from this tree?
When the centurions drove the nails through His hands and feet, the Hero of the story seems to have failed. Jesus appears to have not succeeded, Sin and its bedfellow death appear to have had the final word.
You can imagine those in the ancient world who were hearing the Passion story for the first time. The final word Jesus speaks from the Cross in Luke’s Gospel is “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.”John’s final word of Christ from the Cross is, “It is finished.” Both Luke and John leave us with a lingering ambiguity, perhaps even a glimmer of hope that something was in fact being accomplished on the cross.
But Matthew and Mark leave the hearer staring into the abyss of Christ’s abandonment, his one and only word from the cross in both Gospel’sbeing “Eloi Eloi, Lama Sabachthani”;
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Utter abandonment.
That is, unless you know the tune Christ is singing. To the first Gentile listeners this might have appeared to be the end. But to a Jewish audience they knew that that was not the final word. Why? Because it is only the first line of number 22 in the charts of Israel’s Top 150. Jesus is singing the first line of a song that all Jewish audiences of Matthew and Mark’s Gospels would have known off by heart. You have to know the whole song to hear Christ’s words here properly.
This is how Psalm 22 begins, but not how it ends.
Music, song has a power that mere prose does not. A person with advanced dementia might not be able to speak but they can recite the lyrics to the entire back catalogue of their favourite artist. Because songs get into our heads through our hearts and not our ears. They move us. For the Jews of Jesus’ time, all of the Psalms were sung daily in the temple, committed to memory and committed to heart. They knew the first line of Psalm 22, and they knew the last. They would have known full well that the psalm that begins with an anguished cry of God abandonment concludes with confidence in God’s vindication:
“You who fear the Lord, praise him! … For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him … All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him. Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.”
They knew that Christ’s dying proclamation “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?!” was in fact the first line in Christ’s faithful affirmation that Sin, Death, and Evil – “the antagonist” - is being defeated, and then even in His death, He will be vindicated.
Sin does not have the final word.
So, what do we take from this? Our hearts have been hard won by Christ. On the Cross, as the faithful Hobbit Samwise Gamgee put it, God is indeed making “everything sad come untrue”; that when Thomas Brooks closed his eyes hanging from a bridge in Tennessee, he would open them again to find he was not being condemned but embraced in the love of God; that the knotted and tangled mess of human history is just the underside of a beautiful tapestry that God is crafting.
The Cross gives us hope that even in the deepest darkness, forsakenness, abandonment, even amidst betrayal, and agony, and rejection, and punishment, and judgement, even under the crushing weight of Sin and evil, God will have the final word about you…