Title: “The Truth About Us in Light of the Truth About God.”
Please see Good Friday for Bishop Willimon's biography.
The group gathered for worship and joined in the song,
"The Spirit in Me" (Strathdee):
The spirit in me greets the spirit in you, Alleluia
God's in us and we're in God, Alleluia.
Not so fast.
It might be possible to rally around the notion that we are basically good people who are making progress. It might be possible to contend that there is a nice fit between God and us, that our spirit is virtually contiguous with God’s.
Were it not for this day. This bleak Friday we call “Good.”
The church rubs our collective noses in it, with one of the longest gospel readings of the year, John 18-19. John takes forever to tell the tale of our betrayal, complicity, duplicity, and collusion in the death of Jesus. It’s all there, the worst parts of our collective psychic anatomy – the cowardice of his very best friends, the anxious conniving of the authorities, the way priests Annas and Caiaphas play right into the hands of the Romans. Nervous Pilate, checking the latest public opinion polls. The mob, democracy in action, just a few days shouting “Hosannah!” now screaming for blood and crucifixion. It’s all there, including the most graphic of biblical depictions of the most horrible of deaths.
If we are going to assert that humankind is potentially perfectible, that we are basically good people who mean well and are making moral progress, we shall have to dispose of this story, this day in the church’s year.
Our capacity for denial and deceit about the truth of the worst in us is incredibly great, but this story that knows the truth of us so well and depicts it so graphically, challenges even our powers of evasion.
We really are in a mess. If Golgatha, place of the skull, were only one place, one moment in time that we have at last grown beyond. But no, there is Belfast, and Kosovo, and Belsen Belsen and the list of Calvarys keeps climbing.
We really are fallen. We want to do right, to obey the law, to respond to our better natures. But no, our noble ideals are often a cover for are dark motives and we are usually never so violent as when we set out in some noble cause.
We really do need someone, somehow to save us. Peter, Caiaphas, Pilate, all seem more like puppets than actors, as if they just can’t help themselves, as if they are doomed to take their places in a story that keeps on happening anywhere the innocent suffer, wherever there is horrible hurt, anywhere God attempts to make an incursion among us who so long to be gods unto ourselves.
Two women being interviewed on TV about being fired from their jobs at a fast food restaurant. They were fired because of their sexual orientation. Two men being interviewed related to the story.
“There’s nothing worse than being homosexual,” one says. “Yea,” says the other. “It’s an abomination, the Bible says. Nothing worse than that as an abomination, unless it’s being a Jew.”
We will even use scripture to make a path up Golgatha.
It might be possible to get by on our own, were it not for this day, this Friday we call Good.
This day we are revealed, exposed. But if that were all there was to the story, then Calvary might be remembered like a good novel for its realistic depiction of human evil.
Looking back on this day, Jesus’ people realized that there was more. There, on the cross, with Jesus’ arms outstretched, God was embracing us, entering into our evil, our sin. Later, we came to speak of something so horrible as the cross, as the source of our redemption. We have no hope, except for a God who is willing to meet us where we are, as we are. On the cross, we meet that God, see that God is willing to go to any extreme to have us, just as we are, so that God might make us to who we ought to be.
