Homily for Good Friday

Homily for Good Friday

April 13, 1979

Heb. 4: 14-16
Salesian Community, Marrero, La.

I was still a “baby priest” (less than a year ordained) when I preached this homily.

“We have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (Heb 4: 15).

The Letter to the Hebrews identifies Jesus our heavenly high priest with our human condition.  Altho he is the Son of God, standing before God as an equal when he speaks for us, yet he is one of us.

Although a man in every way, tempted in every way, he did not sin.  Every other priest has had to intercede for his own sins as well as the offenses of others.  Jesus alone stands pure before God.

The Kiss of Judas (Giotto)

Jesus is our high priest.  He has become one of us.  When we say he can sympathize with our weaknesses, we mean he has felt them.  The word sympathize means, literally, “to suffer with.”  When we say he did not sin, we do not mean he was not tried.

For he was as brutally tested as any man has ever been.  Recall stories you have heard about the tests of endurance, of patience, of faith that men and women have undergone:  flood, famine, war, concentration camps, disease, loneliness, poverty, exile, misunderstanding….  Remember some of your own tests of faith:  a difficult teacher, an unexpected death in the family, the misunderstanding of a spouse, the loss of a job, the burden of undesired responsibility, unresponsive students, a bad habit (long-winded preachers?)….

Now look at Christ!  Was he tempted any less than you have been?  Look at his life as a carpenter’s son in a dirty little nowhere called Nazareth.  He belonged to a conquered people ruled by a selfish tyrant.  His own family thought he was nuts.  The men he might have expected to be the first to hear God’s word in his voice—the learned men, the priests, the scribes—these men by and large rejected him.  His closest followers were a dozen nobodies—probably pretty literally a dirty dozen:  stinking fishermen, sweaty farmers, a reformed crook from Rome’s Internal Revenue, all unlettered and uncultured.

When he spoke, everyone agreed with him, but no one understood.  When he said, “You must take up your cross and come after me,” they argued about who was most important.  When he told them they must forgive those who wronged them, Peter wanted to know the legal minimum number of times he had to do it.  When he said those who were rich would have difficulty entering the kingdom, they wanted to know what reward they would get.

They came to Jerusalem, the royal city, and he did the slave’s work of washing their feet.  He warned them he was about to be betrayed by one of them perhaps hoping Judas would hear a word of grace and not do it.  But he did it…one of the Twelve.

They all swore loyalty.  They all ran like chickens from a fox.  Peter was ready to go to prison and die for him … until a serving girl tested him.

Was all that not temptation enuf for the Son of God to lose faith in the mankind he had come to save?  To lose faith in the Father’s will for him?

It was enuf, but it wasn’t.  Which of us would not have said, “I’m fed up with you turkeys!  I’m going back to my carpenter shop and mother’s home cooking.”  But he received the traitor’s kiss, accepted an unjust arrest, and begged that his followers be allowed to run away.

He got a quick trial before a prejudiced court on perjured evidence. He was beaten, spat on, laughed at, turned into the village idiot by the Palestinian “Saturday Night Live” crowd.  He was hustled to governor to tetrarch back to governor, neither having the stomach to dispense justice, both concerned for their careers, neither bothered about a trampy-looking, strangely silent Jewish prophet that no one else seemed to want either.

Be done with him then.  I wash my hands of it.  Crucify him.  He looks like a wretch, a slave; he claims a kingdom; elevate him to a slave’s throne…on a cross.  I’ll sport with him further:  Write over his head, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

It must have hurt.  What must have hurt the Son of God more was to hear God’s people, the people who had struggled for centuries to have no king but the Lord God, to hear these cry out, “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15).  Did they not speak truly?  For the very Word of God they had just condemned.

After this psychological and moral torture, the merely physical torment began:  the Roman pre-execution flogging, 60 or so blows with the metal-tipped lash, and 80 pounds of wooden deathbed to lug up and down the rough, narrow, crowded streets.  He was thrown to the ground; nails were driven thru his flesh; crossbeam and its human sacrifice were jerked into position and suspended between heaven and earth.  He was naked before the world, thirsty, still mocked … and absolutely alone.

Why, even God had left him!  Did he expect a last-minute deliverance?  It may be.  He who had saved others now faced the moment of truth, the moment of death, the ultimate loneliness, the total desolation.  “My God, why have you abandoned me?”  Where are you?  Have you left me here to my doom?  Haven’t I been faithful, and should not you be faithful?  Do something! Can you do anything?  Can I trust you still?

The very psalm Jesus quoted from was his answer.  Psalm 22 begins, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” and concludes, “Men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn” (vv. 30-31).  And Jesus entrusted his life to the Father.  He trusted the Father even unto death.  With the Father, not even death mattered.  God is present, no matter what disaster befalls us, no matter how absent God seems to be.  Jesus had passed the ultimate test; all the bitter vinegar sinful men and jealous demons had to offer him.  “It is finished”; and he gave up his life (John 19:30).

At any one of a dozen points, Jesus might have said, “It is finished,” and meant, “I can’t take this any more.  God asks too much.  Men are too foolish to love any more.”  Truly we have a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses, for he himself has endured them.  He was truly tried in every way we might be.  Unlike us, he was innocent; he sinned not.  He has joined our condition and suffered our fate totally, even unto death, not as the price of his sin but of our sin.

The humanity of Christ is the bait God offered on the fishhook of the cross that Satan might swallow him in the jaws of death and be conquered when those sinful jaws split open on Sunday morning and humanity—our humanity—rose out of them alive and well in Christ Jesus, our victim and our priest.  As surely as he was tested, so shall we be.  But he sympathizes with us and will raise us up to victory with him.  “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb 4:16).