Title: “The Truth About Us in Light of the Truth About God.”

Texts: Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25 or Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42.

Selected Text: John 18:1-19:42.

Theme:  On this day, Good Friday, in the cross of Jesus, we see starkly revealed the truth about who we are.  We are, despite our best intentions, sinners, sinners capable of the very worst of sin.  Still, in the cross, we see dramatically revealed the truth about who God is.  God is, despite who we are, a God who is determined to have us, even to forgive us for the worst of our sin.

Introducing the texts:

                Isaiah 52:13-53:12 – The prophet Isaiah speaks of the suffering servant who redeems by his suffering.

                Hebrews 10:16-25 – “I will remember their sins…no more.”  This is the promise of today’s lesson from the Letter to the Hebrews.

                John 18:1-19:42 --  In a drama that speaks to the ages, John tells of the betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion of Jesus.

ENCOUNTERING THE TEXT:

                What a rich text the lectionary present to us today in our appointed gospel, too rich for mere analysis or exegesis, so rich that it demands only to be read, to be heard on this holy day.  Let us attend to the text, allow it to sweep over us in its entirety.  Then let us respond to the text in honest confession of our complicity and sin in the death of God’s only Son.

                Use the rich array of illustrative material  to serve as catalyst for your own pastoral reflection on today’s vivid gospel.  Then honestly proclaim that Good Friday is revelation of who we are, namely, those who sin and are in desperate need of salvation, salvation that we claim to be ours in the cross of Jesus.

RELATING THE TEXT:

How is the idea of sin faring in Protestant preaching in the United States today?  We might not be surprised to discover that preaching about sin seems troublesome for many contemporary pastors.  Of all the theological topics inviting discussion from the pulpit, there is probably none more potentially distasteful to modern sensibilities than traditional notions of sin and the eternal consequences for those not “saved.”  In contrast to traditional teachings about sin, modern secular ideologies teach people that they can control their own destinies, determine their own characters, and reliably make choices on instinct.  How, then, do today’s Protestant pastors “sell” the idea of sin in a secular age?

                To understand the effects of modern culture on Protestantism--and to investigate how contemporary American churches respond to the influence of secularity--I recently undertook an analysis of the language of sermons preached in American pulpits. 

                In these sermons, sin is still a central topic.  But a close examination of the sermons has shown the many ways in which the concept of sin has been accommodated to fit secular sensibilities.  For while some traditional images of sin are retained in this pulpit speech, the language frequently cushions the listener from their impact, employing a variety of softening rhetorical devices:  depersonalization (which renders notions of sinfulness vague and abstract, removed from specific members of the listening audience), rhetorical selectivity  (which omits the foundational doctrine of original sin--a doctrine that would make inescapable the charge of personal sinfulness), deflection (through which sin is projected off the listening audience and onto groups of outsider others), and therapeutic tolerance (in which sin is translated as errant behavior, explanations for misdeeds sought in the social context rather than in the individual, and judgment replaced by empathy).  In its most extreme formulation, therapeutic tolerance applied to the idea of sin quashes even the possibility of authoritative religious speech, rendering the speaker silent on any matter except for the musings of one’s own subjectivity.

                Yet, in many of the sermons, judgment against sin is in fact rendered.  But it is not aimed at the listeners; indeed, its precise formulations and the nature of its targets may give us some pause.  This may suggest that, while care is taken not to appear unattractive to actual or potential members of the congregation (seeing them as “consumers” to be courted), politeness dose not necessarily extend into norms of tolerance for those outside the reach of the church.  Here, talk about sin appears more to be setting implicit boundaries around communities--”insiders” who are beyond the reach of evaluation and “outsiders” who are targets for it--than to be articulating theological insights into the depravity of human nature.

-- Marsha G. Witten, “Preaching About Sin In Contemporary Protestantism,” Theology Today, Vol. L, No. 2, July, 1993, p. 243, 253.

                                                _________________

                Published just twenty years ago, Karl Menninger’s popular book, Whatever Became of Sin?, gave voice to a widespread suspicion that the concept “sin” was steadily evaporating from everyday life.  Culture in general aside, by century’s end, people concerned specifically about the health of Christian systematic theology--especially if they had been formed by mid-century theological controversies--are entitled to suspect that the doctrine of sin was somehow evaporating from formal theology as well.  After all, by mid-century the clearest line dividing the older, beleaguered Protestant “liberalism” from the newer, unhelpfully labeled “neoorthodoxy” had been the distinction between the “optimistic” view that human nature was progressively improving beyond sin and the “pessimistic” view that human nature is inherently and structurally “estranged.”  The last quarter of the century, however, has been dominated by discussion of theologies of “critical correlation” with general human experience, theologies of “liberation” and theologies of “hope.”  The doctrine of sin may no longer seem prominent in the conversation.  If this suspicion were true, it would be of profound importance for the social as well as the intellectual history of Christianity, because the doctrine of sin is one of those doctrines in which Christian life-forming is held closest to Christian truth-claiming, practical theology closest to dogmatic theology.  What has happened to the doctrine of sin?

                -- David H. Kelsey, “Whatever Happened to the Doctrine of Sin?” Theology Today, July, 1993, Vol. L. No.2, p. 169.

                                                _____________________

                                “Everything’s s’pposed to be different that what is here.”

                                                                 Mac (Danny Glover) in “Grand Canyon”

                At the center of the Christian Bible, four Gospels describe the pains God has taken to defeat sin and its wages.  Accordingly, Christians have often measured sin, in part, by the suffering needed to atone for it. The ripping and writhing of death on a cross, the bizarre metaphysical maneuver of using death to defeat death, the urgency of the summons to human beings to allay themselves with the events of Christ and with the person of these events, and then to make that person and those events the center of their lives--these things tell us that the main human brokenness is desperately difficulty to fix, even for God, and that, while annoyances, regrets, and miseries trouble us in all the old familiar ways, none of them matters as much as sin.

                One reason is that sin perverts special human excellences.  When people devise and defend high-minded political fraud, when a musician enjoys a spasm of sweet satisfaction over a sour review of a colleague’s recital, when a drug dealer wants and plans to snag a fresh customer, when a teenager reviles his confused grandmother, when we put other people on a tight moral budget, while making plenty of allowances for ourselves--when people do these things, they exhibit a corruption of thought, emotion, intention, speech, and disposition.  By such abuse of our powers, we creatures of dignity and responsibility evoke not only consternation, but also blame.

                In the film “Grand Canyon,” an immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and attempts to bypass it.  His route takes him along streets that seem s darker and more deserted.  Then, the predictable Bonfire of the Vanities nightmare:  The man’s fancy sports car stalls on one of those alarming streets whose teenaged guardians wear expensive guns and sneakers.  He doe manage to phone for a tow truck.  But before it arrives, five young street toughs surround the attorney’s disabled car and threaten him with considerable bodily harm.  Just in time, the tow truck shows up and its driver--an earnest, genial man--begins to hook up to the sports car.  The toughs protest:  the driver is interrupting their meal.  So the drives take the group leader aside and attempts a five sentence introduction to metaphysics; “Man,” he says, “the world ain’t s’pposed to work like this.  Maybe you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s s’pposed to be.  I’m s’pposed to be able to do my job without askin’ you if I can.  And that dude is s’pposed to be able to wait with is car without your rippin’ him off.  Everything’s s’pposed to be different than what it is here.”

                The driver is an heir of St. Augustine.  And his summary of the human predicament belongs in every book of theology.  For central in the classic Christian understanding of the world is a concept of the way things are supposed to be.  They ought to be as designed and intended by God, both in creation and in graceful transformation of creation.  They are supposed to include peace that adorns and completes justice, mutual respect and goodwill, deliberate and widespread attention to the public good.

                Of course, things are not that way at all. Human wrongdoing, or the threat of it, mars every adult’s workday, every child’s schoolday, every vacationer’s holiday.  A moment’s reflection yields memories and images of wrongdoing so commonplace that we are likely to accept them as normal:  A criminal in a 40s film noir hangs up a pay telephone receiver; before exiting the booth, he rips from the telephone book the page he had consulted and pockets it.  A third grader distributes party invitations in a manner calculated to let the omitted classmates clearly see their exclusion.  Her teacher notes but never ponders the social dynamics of this distribution scheme.  A certain breed of motorist first cuts you off and then, to assure that you know the move was intentional, offers you a hand signal of intonation familiarity.  (The offending driver may be a person who has never bothered to curb his wrath and who might be both puzzled and wrathful at the suggestion that he should begin to do so.)  Two old flames meet again for the first time since graduation and begin to flicker with nostalgia and boozy self-pity over what might have been. Though each feels happily married to someone else, somehow the evening climaxes for the two grad in a room at the Marriott.

                Perhaps we think most often of sin as a spoiler of creation; people adulterate a marriage, or befoul a stream, or use their excellent minds to devise a truly ingenious tax fraud.  But resistance to redemption counts a sin, too, and often displays a special perversity….

                The Bible presents sin in an array of images:  Sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold.  Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck.  It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it--both transgression and shortcoming.  Sin is a beast crouching at the door.  In sin, people attack, or evade, or neglect their divine calling;  These and other images suggest deviance; even when it is familiar, sin is never normal.  Sin is disruption of created harmony and, then, resistance to divine restoration of it.  Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God,…

                -- Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. “Not the Way it’s S’pposed to Be:  A Breviary of Sin,” Theology Today, July, 1993, pp. 179-181. 

                                                ___________________

                On Palm Sunday we go through Luke’s account of Christ’s death in excruciating detail, as we will go through it again with John on Good Friday, bit in between those two tombstones death recedes, looming above the narratives of Holy Week like a vulture in a tree.  Meanwhile, Jesus enters Jerusalem to settle his affairs, speaking to the crowd for the last time and then withdrawing with this disciples, to instruct them  and wash their feet.  God wills this.

                All but one of the gospel lessons for Holy Week are from John, which means that Jesus moves toward his death with a strong, prescient confidence. His life is not taken from him; he gives it willingly.  If he is terrified, it does not show.  Of all human beings, he is the most able to wad into the bloody darkness alone, trusting that he will not be alone forever for long.  In the background, the Old Testament lessons play the servant songs of  Isaiah, reminding us that suffering has always been the vocation of God’s chosen ones.

                On Good Friday there is no escape.  The vultures are perched low now; friends have vanished and the enemy is everywhere.  The only good news is that there is one man who does not dissemble, one man who continues to speak the truth although it brings all the empires of this world crashing down on his head.  According to John, Jesus does not give up his ghost until he knows that “It is finished” (19:30).  Whether or not he knows what happens next, he knows that he is part of something beyond himself, something he has brought to fullness by surrendering himself to it as to the incalculable, incomparable will of God.

                In faith, we believe that the terrors of Lent and of our lives are purifying terrors, confounding clauses in a covenant we may nonetheless trust.  While they are washing  all our certainties away, it is hard to believe they may also be cleansing us of our illusions, but that is the dare.  If we are tempted to draw back from it and seek and easier way, we are not along.  The world is full of former disciples.  “Do you also wish to go away?” Jesus asks the handful who are left him in the sixth chapter of John (6:67).  “Lord,” Simon Peter answers him, “to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.”

                -- Barbara Brown Taylor, “Preaching the Terrors,” Journal For Preachers, Lent, 1992, p. 7

Please see Good Friday, Pg. 2 for the sermon and its image set.