Good Friday 2025

As Christians, one of the temptations we have when we read our Gospel texts is to try to harmonize them. That is, we try to put them all together like a puzzle, like if we do so just right they’ll work as one story. But we should resist that urge. Each evangelist, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, have their own distinct style, their own distinct audiences, and their own distinct theology that makes each story more meaningful and more powerful if we let them stand on their own. After all, they made the cut for our canon of scripture by being meaningful all on their own.

There is one seemingly practical point, which is actually a theological point, about which John disagrees with the other three Gospels: whether or not the Last Supper was a Passover meal. The way in which we calculate the date of Easter in modern times means that it doesn’t always line up with the date of Passover, although it does this year. The ways in which Jews celebrate Passover have changed over the past 2000 years, especially following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70AD. One of the ways in which it has changed is there is no longer a literal lamb that is sacrificed. But at the time of Jesus, there was. And in the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus celebrates the Passover with his disciples, which would include eating the Lamb. But according to John, Jesus doesn’t do this for one important reason: Jesus is the Lamb.

John gives us a hint of this belief in chapter 1. When John the Baptist (not the same as the writer of John) first saw Jesus coming he declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (1:29) While John is mixing metaphors - the Passover Lamb is not a sin sacrifice - it isn’t a stretch to see that John is doing what Jesus constantly does: he reimagines the practices of his own people in light of the “new” information of Jesus. 

Furthermore, John is rarely saying just one thing - it’s part of how John is sometimes called the “spiritual” Gospel. And Israel’s scriptures have a key figure who is also likened to a lamb. We read about him in Isaiah today: the Suffering Servant, who “was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”

In the words of Dr. Paul D. Hanson, who taught Old Testament for 40 years at Harvard Divinity School, “Isaiah 53 is Second Isaiah’s contribution to this spiritual quest for an answer to the question of how the tragic pattern of sin and punishment could be broken and replaced by the wholeness that accompanies a hearty embrace of God’s compassion and righteousness. It revolves around the notion of a servant of the Lord whose surrender to God’s will was so total that he took the consequence of the sin of the community upon himself, even though he was innocent of any wrong. This of course is the stuff of martyrdom, which can be moving but totally ineffective in relation to the human plight unless accompanied by one critically significant dimension: the Servant is not acting alone. The Servant is serving God’s purpose. Not tragic fate, but obedience to the Lord motivates the Servant to place no limits on self-giving love.” (156-7)

Isaiah was not writing a prediction of Jesus. He was likely making a statement about Israel during the Babylonian exile. But, like the writer of John, the prophets rarely mean only one thing. And one of the reasons the prophets continue to be meaningful  throughout the centuries is how they speak to our relationship with God. Although the book of Isaiah wasn’t actively foreshadowing Jesus, the book of Acts is explicit that the early church believed that Jesus is that Suffering Servant of Isaiah. When Philip meets the Ethiopian Eunuch on the side of the road, it is this very passage from Isaiah that the Ethiopian is reading and asks Philip to interpret for him. Philip proclaims the Gospel to the Ethiopian, who is baptized right then and there. The end of the Servant poem declares that, like a sin offering, the Servant’s suffering brings forgiveness to many; the Servant will be exalted among the great and the strong.

Shortly, we will bring forward a cross and offer the practice of remembering our Suffering Servant through the Veneration of the Cross. The Veneration of the Cross makes me uncomfortable. It can feel overly demonstrative - even though we know that this is not the cross of Jesus. We know this is a stand-in, and that having a tactile and three-dimensional reminder of the cross can be extremely helpful in creating a more meaningful experience. We know that with children, it’s developmentally appropriate - and important - for them to have things to touch because that is how we best learn. But along the way we slowly internalize the outward physical experience by looking with our eyes and not our hands for everything. The Veneration of the Cross gives us an opportunity to use our primal sense of touch to experience this day.

The earliest description of a Veneration of the Cross is found in the late fourth century treatise “The Pilgrimage of Egeria.” In Egeria’s writings, she described the liturgical practices she came across in her travels. Sometimes they are particularly frustrating for modern-day liturgists, because she only named ways in which the practices she came across were different than what she was used to - so it reads something like, “in this, they do it the same way as we do” but not articulate what that way was. In her diary she described the Good Friday ceremonies in Jerusalem. During that service, fragments that were believed to be of the true cross were placed on a table in front of the bishop. The people came forward, bowed toward the table, and kissed the sacred wood. Variations of the ceremony developed throughout Christianity. The custom was restored in the 1979 BCP (p. 281), in which a wooden cross may be brought into the church and placed in the sight of the people.

Today, we are all invited to spend time in contemplation at the foot of the cross. One of my favorite theologians, NT Wright, frequently reminds his readers to take up their sorrows and bring them to the foot of the cross. He wrote, “I am convinced that when we bring our griefs and sorrows within the story of God’s own grief and sorrow, and allow them to be held there, God is able to bring healing to us and new possibilities to our lives. That is, of course, what Good Friday and Easter are all about.” So today we bring those griefs and sorrows and entrust them to Jesus’ care. Amen.