Sermon: Good Friday Addresses

Preacher:
Date:: Friday 29th March 2013
Venue:: St Andrew's, Oxshott
Service:: Three Hour Devotion

LIFE IN THE SPIRIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST JOHN

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy,^* drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.
Galatians 5.16-end

12.00 pm - PREPARATION

The ministers enter the church in silence and the Good Friday Collect is prayed.

Almighty Father,
look with mercy on this your family
for which our Lord Jesus Christ was content to be betrayed
and given up into the hands of sinners
and to suffer death upon the cross;
who is alive and glorified with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

MINISTRY OF THE WORD

Reading: John 18.1-18.14

Address 1 - ‘Passions and Desires’

Before I begin my addresses today, may I bring the greetings of the Chapter and community at the Cathedral, where, just as we are now, in keeping with Christians throughout the world, the Death and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is being proclaimed. Please pray for my community, Cathedral and University, as we pray for you.

At the heart of everything about today is Jesus’ words in St John’s Gospel, ‘for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ (John 3.16).

On Good Friday we have to face up to the way we live when we are alienated from the abundant love of God. The Passion of Jesus Christ exposes and lays out those things that St Paul describes as the works of the flesh (Galatians 4.16-21). This is when we choose to look to darkness and not the light: lack of reverence for the human body (Jesus is beaten and slapped, scourged and whipped); idolatry (Jesus’s divine identity and faithfulness to the Father goes unrecognised as human beings create their own god in their own image); there is enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy (think of Peter, Judas, the powers and authorities). These are all sadly recognisable in human life today. Yet the ‘good’ of Good Friday is that in the death and resurrection of Jesus these default traits of humanity are declared not to be the last word.

One of the great joys of ministering at a Cathedral dedicated to the Holy Spirit – although I thoroughly approve of yours to St Andrew! – is that the dedication gives us a reference point and a treasury of gifts to explore our distinctive charisms; those gifts that God wants to give us. So we draw deeply from the fruits of the Spirit listed by St Paul in his letter to the Christian church in Galatia – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5.22b-23a). What a vision if they were truly reflected in our community as a Cathedral, or here, and also in our lives day to day in the world.

For St Paul goes on immediately to say, ‘and those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit let us also be guided by the Spirit’. (Galatians 5.24, 25)

I want to offer in this time together ways that together we might reflect more deeply on how we are reconciled to Christ and one another, how we become with him a gift to the world, and how we set aside our preferences so that we come, in St Benedict’s words to ‘prefer nothing to Christ, and may he bring us all together to eternal life’ (Rule of St Benedict: 72).

We come first to a garden. We can’t hear about a garden in scripture without being alerted to another garden: Eden. In that garden of paradise, humanity, personified by Adam and his wife Eve, is at one with God. Nothing impedes that relationship; they are totally unconcerned with self, they are wholly at one with God and there is an abundance of blessing. But the life of that garden is violated by disobedience, dissembling before God, and the man and the woman turning in on themselves and away from God.

One of the defining moments of my childhood was when the Blue Peter garden was vandalised. A beautiful (human) creation was despoiled and trampled upon; all that careful tending, growing and thriving destroyed. Eden is destroyed: but God is faithful. His desire is to restore us to become what we were always made to be in the first place, people of love and not barriers, who receive God’s grace and don’t try to snatch it away.

The garden into which Jesus and his disciples go is dark, it’s outside the city. It’s a place they have been to before; they know the layout, that’s how Judas knew where to come. This garden - which Sts Matthew and Mark name as Gethsemane - becomes the stage on which the works of the flesh are enacted: Judas betrays; Peter draws his sword. And they are people who have followed Jesus for three years, have heard him, eaten with him, walked with him, prayed with him. Fidelity to Christ is not just a matter of the head or opinions I hold about my faith, in fact it’s never that. Fidelity to Christ is about the whole person, letting go of myself, my preferences and sharp elbows to nudge others out of the way; it is life in the Spirit, life disentangled from the manipulations and power games of the world.

Judas is betraying himself and who he can be; he is betraying his idolatrous and misguided ideas and opinions about who Jesus is and thinks that he, Judas, can bounce Jesus into being the Jesus he wants. Peter is not defending Jesus - if he knew him at all he would know there is no need to draw the sword – he is defending his own sensibilities. Indeed Judas and Peter are on a par here, both living in the flesh of defensiveness, competition and rivalry.

Adam and Eve ‘heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and [they] hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden’ (Genesis 3.8). In the Passion according to St John, Judas and Peter hide themselves from the presence of God not by clothing themselves with fig leaves, but with their frail and defensive egos. Evening in Eden is repeated in Gethsemane; as it’s repeated in Guildford and in Oxshott when we prefer ourselves to Christ.

Silence

Hymn - Glory be to Jesus

12.30 pm

Reading: John 18.15-27

Address 2 - ‘When love goes cold’

It is night, and it is cold in the garden. Jesus is bundled away by the police. The stage is now the courtyard of the high priest’s house where Jesus will be interrogated. Peter follows on with another nameless disciple. And famously Peter denies Jesus three times.

Peter has happily identified with Jesus in times of public acclamation, in times of glory, he had a wobble when Jesus took on the role of servant to wash his feet, and now he can’t associate with Jesus as the cross looms before him.

For now Peter stands beside a brazier warming himself. But the trouble is Peter’s love has gone cold. Standing by the brazier, isn’t going to warm the profound coldness that has taken hold of him. It is a paralysing cold; it is the cold of breaking down; it is the cold of life draining away.

The tragedy of Peter’s coldness is that he is elsewhere in the gospels such a warm, even hot blooded man. Peter is passionate, impetuous and trusting.

When love goes cold, what hope is there? A popular song says this,

Love goes cold,
Blood, tears and gold,
Won’t make it any better

That’s true to a point. Gold can’t warm love. It is a strategy of the flesh that thinks we can buy or sell love; it is of the flesh to think that love is a currency of financial transaction. Mary Magdalene’s love for Jesus is warmed not by selling her body for gold but being prepared to receive his generous, non-grasping love as a gift. Transactional love is not love at all because it turns people into objects and makes them not human persons to be loved but objects to be won or bought. So no, gold can’t warm cold love.

But didn’t Jesus pay the price of our sin? Isn’t that a kind of transaction? If we only talk of Jesus making a payment, the danger is that we take out the love. To declare, ‘Jesus paid the price’ sounds as if our salvation was a commodity for sale and the trading price was the exorbitantly high price of a life. It sounds like Caiaphas in our first passage of John who says ‘isn’t it better for one man to die than all the people perish’ (John 18.14).

When it comes to tears we’re getting warmer. Tears can reflect love. Tears can bear pain: as our children say when they have really hurt themselves, ‘these are real tears’. Tears often come with the regrets of love. Tears can restore. The Bible is full of lament and tears. We weep over what we have lost in order that we might be restored and healed. After denying Jesus three times as St Matthew and St Luke record, Peter went out having denied Jesus, and ‘wept bitterly’(Matthew 26.75b; Luke 22.62). That’s not something St John details, he asks us to wait.

Gold can’t warm love; tears begin to warm it: so what of blood? The Christian faith rests on resurrection, and resurrection is only possible after death. Jesus’ blood shed on the cross is life giving. In Hebrew thought blood is the transmitter of life. So it is after the murder of Abel, that the LORD demands of Cain, ‘what have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!’ (Genesis 4. 10) On one level that is a poetic image but also powerfully conveys a way of understanding the language about the blood of Christ shed for us. In Hebrew thought a person’s life is in the blood. That the origin of the Jehovah’s Witness aversion to blood transfusions, that someone else’s life blood will go into your veins and in some way you are no longer you. Christians don’t hold to that. What we do hold to is that mystically Jesus’ blood enters into our veins and life in the Eucharist. So blood does warm love.

For Peter as with us, it is through the shedding of the Saviour’s blood that love and life is warmed again. That is made real to us in the Creator Spirit who gives the life of Jesus to us, so that we are fully in communion with our loving heavenly Father. It is by the Holy Spirit that our hearts are warmed and life becomes vivid and abundant: as John Wesley records of the renewal of his faith, ‘my heart was strangely warmed’. The flames of the Holy Spirit warm us and bring us to life. In a Pentecost sermon St Leo the Great says, ‘This Spirit of Truth makes the home of his glory shine with the glow of his own light, and in his temple wishes nothing to be dark, nothing to be lukewarm’.

The deep chill that Peter went through was a dying to self. It prefigures baptism when we drown to the life of the flesh and rise to breathe the life of the Spirit: this is resurrection.

So we have been to a garden via a charcoal fire, and here are two hints of resurrection tucked in the cold, dark night of betrayal and denial. For the Garden of Gethsemane becomes the Garden of resurrection; the brazier of denial becomes the resurrection charcoal fire on which Jesus cooks fish and asks Peter three times ‘do you love me?’ Yes, Lord’ he replies you know that I love you. (John 21.15-19)

Hymn - Drop, drop slow tears

1.00 pm

Reading: John 18.28-38a

Address 3 - ‘Led into all truth’

In these addresses I am reflecting on the life of the Spirit in the Passion Gospel of St John. Truth is a key word in St John’s Gospel, and it is profoundly a ‘Spirit’ word: little wonder that Pilate asks what it is; the life of the Spirit is barely discernible in the brutality of the oppressive Roman military machine.

In the prologue, those 18 opening verses of St John’s Gospel, so well-known from Christmas readings, John first evokes the very creation of the world; and God’s creation is linked to the operation of the Holy Spirit. ‘In the beginning…’ says John (John 1.1) triggering in our minds the association with the opening of Genesis: ‘In the beginning…’ says Genesis, ‘when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters’. That ‘wind’ is the Spirit, as the Authorised Version puts it, ‘the Spirit brooded over the face of the waters’.

John’s gospel frames Jesus Christ - his birth, his life and death - in the creative work of the Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life (Nicene Creed).

So, in the prologue, Jesus is the ‘true light’ (John 1.9) coming into the world. Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh, whose glory we see: ‘the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth’ (John 1.14). Jesus Christ is the new liberator, greater even than Moses: ‘The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’ (John 1.17).

In Jesus’ life the Spirit is firmly the Spirit of life and truth. When Nicodemus comes to Jesus he speaks of the Spirit, ‘that blows where it chooses’ (John 3.8a) and that everyone is to be born of the Spirit. ‘This is the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides in you, and he will be in you’ (John 14.17). And Jesus promises the gift of the Spirit to his disciples who will lead them and guide them into all truth (John 15.26; 16.13).

It is with this overwhelming identification with the Spirit that is the context of how we read Pilate’s enduring question. And that question comes in response to Jesus’ statement, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice’ (John 18.37b).

All who hear Jesus’ words are faced with a choice. This is the stark choice John’s gospel and the first letter of St John puts to us the contrasting spirit of truth or the spirit of error (1 John 4.6). The old dichotomy is before us again: Jesus is either a delusional character or the bearer of the truth.

Pilate’s question is a very human question, a question many of us are inclined to ask, when all around us people and narratives that we thought were trustworthy and reliable become exposed as flawed. Truth and trust are inseparable. As we ask about the truth in our own lives it is practically impossible to acknowledge to ourselves, let alone to others, let alone to God who we really are. What is truth about you, about me?

The Sprit searches everything, says St Paul (Romans 8.27; 1 Corinthians 2.10): the searching, truthful and truth revealing Spirit. The Spirit tells us the truth about a world that is competitive, envying, destructive and closed in on itself. ‘The Spirit searches everything’ says St Paul, ‘even the depths of God’ (1 Corinthians 2.10). The Spirit enables us to abide in God (1 John 4.13).

Pilate’s question then deflects away from truth and the Spirit, for, sadly, Pilate is caught up in the competitive, envying, destructive world, unable to see beyond himself: the Cross is the key to unlocking our hearts too from that life that has shut down to others, to ourselves, to God.

The best capturing of this is in the Psalms:

¹O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me : thou knowest my downsitting and mine up-rising, thou understandest my thoughts long before.

⁴ Thou hast fashioned me behind and before : and laid thine hand upon me.

⁶Whither shall I flee from thy Spirit : or whither shall I go then from thy presence?

²³ Try me, O God, and seek the ground of my heart : prove me, and examine my thoughts.

²⁴ Look well if there be any way of wickedness in me : and lead me in the way everlasting.

Hymn - O Sacred head sore wounded

1.30 pm

Reading: John 18.38b-19.16a

Address 4 - ‘Where are you from?’

On this Good Friday we are exploring the life of the Spirit in the Passion of St John. So far there has been a rich theme of the Spirit: the Spirit moving as the Spirit of truth, as the Spirit who warms us to love, as the Creator Spirit who refreshes and renews us.

What echoes in this fourth address is the question of Pilate to Jesus, ‘where are you from?’

My mother was born in Argentina; that is my closest claim to fame relating to the new Pope. My grandfather was a missionary there before and just after the Second World War. My mother left the country at the age of two with a baby’s identity card, complete with a baby-faced photo and thumbprint in place of a signature. She didn’t return until her sixtieth birthday. She returned on a British passport causing much confusion amongst the border control in Buenos Aries when they saw her place of birth: Cordoba, Argentina. ‘Where are you from?’ she was asked. ‘You are Argentinian, you were born here, where is your proper passport?’

‘Where are you from?’ This is another of Pilate’s penetrating questions. ‘Where are you from?’ is a way of saying ‘who are you?’, ‘on what authority are you here?’ St John has already announced the answer for us at the very start of his gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God’ (John 1.1,2). This is where he is from; he is from God.

In John’s gospel, Jesus is regularly asked where he is from and when he answers he invites us to the place where he is from. As readers of the gospel, and as believers, we know where he is from. Early in the gospel two of John the Baptist’s disciples, one is identified as Andrew, ask Jesus ‘where are you staying?’ another way of saying ‘where are you from?’ or ‘where are you at?’ Jesus says to them, ‘Come and see’ (John 1.38). That is such an invitation, and that is where the gospel takes us, on a journey to see where Jesus is from, who he is.

Earlier in the gospel the crowd says ‘we know where this man is from; but when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from’. Then Jesus cried out as he was teaching in the temple, ‘You know me, and you know where I am from. I have not come on my own. But the one who sent me is true, and you do not know him. I know him because I am from him, and he sent me.’ (John 7.27-29)

The Holy Spirit makes Jesus known to us. In his earthly life it is the Spirit who makes him known as the Anointed One, and now that he is ascended and risen it continues to be the Holy Spirit who reveals Jesus to the world.

The Holy Spirit makes Jesus known, where he is from and who he is, at the Baptism. In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Spirit descends in the form of a dove, anointing him, as the Father declares, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved with whom I am well pleased’ an action echoed and repeated at the Transfiguration. And in the same context, John the Baptist says, ‘I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’ (John 1.33-35)

This is John’s witness and testimony: the Spirit has identified him and made him known. The answer to Pilate’s question to Jesus, ‘where are you from?’ is revealed by the Spirit, not just as a factual answer but an answer to be lived. This has a bearing on you and me. In a whole host of ways each Christian is asked ‘where are you from?’ Living life in the Spirit means that whilst residents and participants in the world, at the same time ‘our citizenship is in heaven’ (Philippians 3.20), which makes us exiles and pilgrims.

I remember at my own confirmation the Bishop asking the confirmands, ‘where is your home?’ one boy stuck his head above the parapet and answered, ‘Everdon’, a local village. ‘No’ boomed the Bishop. Another boy briefed by a priest who had heard the question before raised his hand piously and said, ‘My home is heaven.’ I’m afraid I was the second boy!

Where is your true home? The answer will always be a paradox for the Christian. It’s a bit like Pilate’s other question, ‘are you a king?’ Jesus’ kingship is real but not of this world, in other words, it’s not the sort of kingship that Pilate could recognise. Repeatedly Pilate reveals that he can’t see beyond himself: how he needs to be open to the life of the Spirit and the gospel.

I’m not picking on Pilate. Pilate represents something. He represents the human condition – you and me – when we are most alienated from the Spirit, and bound up in the flesh, a world described in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Death has taken hold of Pilate, and those like him. Violence, condemnation, murder are the landmarks in the landscape of his existence.

So, then, Jesus is handed over. Handed over to the powers of death, flesh and darkness, a world that shuns the warmth, gentleness and light of the Spirit. He is handed over into the very depths.

We know where he is from. We know where he is going. This is the hour of darkness.

Hymn - My song is love unknown

2.00 pm

Reading: John 19.16b-30

Address 5 - ‘Water and blood’

‘It is finished. Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit’ (John 19.30b).

Birth and death are in close proximity. How often do we hear of a death and a birth around the same time? My own father-in-law died only months after the birth of our first son: it wasn’t so much a ‘one in, one out’ thing, but somehow in births and deaths we become aware of the of the unavoidable reality that faces those of us who have been given the gift of life, that we will one day die, our mortality.

In the book of Genesis there is a most beautiful image of the life giving Spirit: ‘the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being’ (Genesis 2.7). That is a most evocative expression I know of the kiss of life that God gives to each one of us. Our very life is God’s gift and is thoroughly sustained by him. I don’t know about you, but I am not good at simply pausing and giving thanks for my breath. A good spiritual exercise to lead us into prayer is the awareness of our breath and breathing: breathe in (inhale) the life of the Spirit, and breathe out (exhale) to expel my own vanity and sin.

‘It is finished. Then Jesus bowed his head and gave up his Spirit’. This wasn’t him giving up like someone who couldn’t go on any longer. His is not finished in the sense of being old news or nothing more to do; this is the time of accomplishment: his ‘hour has come’. In St John’s gospel Jesus is always shown to be full of purpose. He hasn’t just flaked out, he is handing over, breathing out, giving over his Spirit. This Spirit is given to Mary and John who at the foot of the cross have become the first two cells of the church that by the power of the Spirit, the Lord of the Church, will grow and multiply to the ends of the earth.

The words to Mary and John are so beautiful: ‘behold you son; behold your mother’. Just as the LORD gave the loving kiss of life to Adam, and Jesus Christ does to the world, so Mary and John giving a loving kiss as mother and son, not biologically related, but related in the Body of Christ, the Church. The Spirit breathes on them to animate them into a new relationship, a new way of being.

For St John, this is the birth of the Church: relationships not based on biology or desire but bound together by the Spirit. And there is more birthing imagery in our penultimate passage from St John, when the spear is thrust into Jesus’ side and blood and water come flowing out. Blood and water is what surrounded and held each one of us in our mothers’ womb. As waters break we are brought to birth. Early in St John’s Gospel, Jesus tells Nicodemus to expect water as a sign of birth into the life of the Spirit, and in his first letter the same author writes, ‘This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is one that testifies, for the Spirit is truth.’ (1 John 5.6)

Death and life are bound together. To live in the Spirit is to die to the flesh. The death of Jesus is full of paradox: it is a life giving death; it is a death brought about by hatred that reveals perfect love; it is the death of one man giving life to you and me. St John Chrysostom declares: ‘I see him crucified; I call him King.’

This is seeing things in the life of the Spirit. This is the only way we can come to know deep in our hearts that God’s deepest revelation of love is through the death of his Son.

Dying, you destroyed our death.
Rising, you restored our life.
Lord Jesus, come in glory.

Hymn - When I survey the wondrous cross

2.30 pm

Reading: John 19.31-42

THE PRAYERS OF INTERCESSION

God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
Therefore we pray to our heavenly Father
for people everywhere according to their needs.

Let us pray for the Church of God throughout the world:
for unity in faith, in witness and in service,
for bishops and other ministers, and those whom they serve,
for N, our bishop, and the people of this diocese,
for all Christians in this place,
for those to be baptized,
for those who are mocked and persecuted for their faith,
that God will conﬁrm his Church in faith,
increase it in love, and preserve it in peace.

Silence is kept.