Good Friday Message & Sermon 10-04-2020

Hello Jesus’ followers,

As we enter into the solemn mood on this the holiest of our holy days, we kneel at the feet of the cross, crying for our loved one who has died.  We were not his followers then, but we are his followers now.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about haiku, Japanese poetry enshrined within 17 syllables.

My morning dog walks are slow…Harry is middle aged, blind, and has been off colour the past few days.  The walk allows me to wake up properly, pray, and sometimes, through the silence, bits of haiku start to form.  Today, this Good Friday one came into being:

Mary on her cross.

Heart shredded by grief’s talons.

“My son, my son, why…”

Blessings as you mourn, and wait through Holy Saturday. Sometimes we are not good at waiting, impatient in this society of 2 minute noodles, drive-through food etc, though these weeks in lock down may have made us a little more patient.  When we slow down, when we wait…well, we see things we haven’t noticed before, we become mindful.

In the darkness, remember…you are loved. In Jesus’ darkest time, he remembered and cared for others, right to the end:

‘When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. ‘(John 19: 26-27)

Barbara

Good Friday Service: Leighmoor Uniting Church, 2020.

If you have a cross, of any kind, I invite you to have it in front of you, or wear it, during this service at home, and to have as a focus for the rest of the day. I would have used other symbols for the Good Friday service, having them as the ‘voices’, but instead I have chosen to put together a service that is easier to follow on your own, or with a small family group.

Introduction

On this Good Friday we hear the Bible Readings, and are invited to enter the story, through some of the key characters. When we hear their stories we may ask ourselves: Am I like Peter?  Do I deny Jesus? Do I grieve like Mary?  Each of the stories (some of them adapted from Whole People of God material) is linked with Bible readings, if you want to look them up. I was going to include them as well, but it would be many more pages!  I have included prayers, parts of hymns, and a poem.  You may enter into all of it, or part of it.  You may even choose to focus on a hymn, or a reading, instead. 

Prayer

From the depth of his agony, Jesus cried out:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In this question he identified himself with all who suffer pain, rejection, and death.

We are invited to experience God’s presence, even in our darkest hours.

This is the darkest of all Christian days, yet we worship God.

In our grief, we seek God’s caring presence.

Amen.

Hymn 339: O sacred head sore wounded.

  1. O sacred head sore wounded,

with grief and shame weighed down;

O kingly head surrounded

with thorns your only crown;

death’s shadows rise before you,

the glow of life decays;

yet hosts of heaven adore you

and tremble as they gaze.

  1. What language shall I borrow

to praise you, heavenly friend,

for this your dying sorrow,

your mercy without end?

Such agony and dying!

Such love to sinners free!

O Christ, all grace supplying,

turn now your face on me.

  1. In this your bitter Passion,

good Shepherd, think of me,

look on me with compassion,

unworthy though I be:

beneath your cross abiding

forever would I rest,

in your dead love confiding,

and with your presence blessed.

(-Paul Gerhardt)

Reflections

  1. Judas Iscariot tells his story: (Luke 22:39-51)

Was I there?  Yes, I, Judas Iscariot was there all right.  I don’t suppose you’ll ever understand why I acted as I did.  But if you had known Jesus as I knew him, perhaps you wouldn’t be quite so harsh in your condemnation.

Why, he had everything going for him!  He could make the crowds hang on his words.  There were hundreds-no thousands-who would have done anything he asked them to do.  He was the perfect leader for our people.  And then he threw it all away.  It would have been child’s play for him to get the whole nation behind him and throw those detested Romans clear out of the country.  I was sure that’s what he was leading up to, with all his fine talk about a kingdom.  And then he blew it.  “My kingdom is not of this world”-indeed!

I tell you I’ve never been more disappointed in my life.  Someone who lets people down like that ought to be betrayed.  And yet…O God…I wish I could forget those eyes that seemed to see right into me.  I wish he had just stopped loving me for one bitter moment.  Perhaps it would be easier for me now.

  1. Peter tells his story: Luke 22: 54-62

How could I have done it?  “I’m your man, Jesus.  You can count on me!  Maybe not on anybody else, but you can count on good old Peter the Rock” That’s what I said to him, not 24 hours ago.  And I meant every word of it.  I was so sure that nothing could ever make me let him down.  And then look what I did- told those men and that serving girl, three times in arrow, that I never even knew him!

Never knew him!  I knew him as I’ve never known anyone in my life.  To think that I was the one who realised on the mountain top that here was no mere mortal, but God living with us.  I was the one who blurted it out: “Jesus, you’re the Christ, the son of the living God!”

And now I’ve denied him.  And without any doubt those murdered will have his life.  My last chance to say I’m sorry, or to do anything to help him.  If only there could be another chance.

  1. Pilate tells his story: Matthew 27: 11-31

Why, oh why, did I have to become governor of a God-forsaken little province like this?  A bunch of lunatics-that’s what these people are!  Coming to me with their petty little disputes, threatening an insurrection if I don’t do exactly what they want.

This was the last straw, this Jesus business.  Why, they didn’t have a case against him at all.  Sheer jealousy, that’s all it was.  And he stood head and shoulders over every one of them who were after his blood.  I’ve never seen such courage.  He took his flogging, and all the jeering and spitting without ever flinching.

I wish there’d been some way of saving him.  I really do!  I tried…God knows I tried.  But what can you do with a howling mob like that?  If there’d been a riot, and Caesar had heard about it…well, at least, nobody can hold me responsible for his death.  I’ve washed my hands of the whole thing.  Still, I wish there’d been some way…I just can’t forget the way he looked at me.  I don’t think I ever will.

Poem: The Four

(written by a member of a previous congregation):

‘Peter, Judas, Pilate…

What shame surrounds the three.

But shame on shame,

a hundred shames on me!

My Lord I slayed.

For I betrayed, and I denied and crucified

the One who so loved me.

I did the same, yet laid the blame

on them, those other three.’

  1. The criminal tells his story: John 19: 16-18, Luke 23: 39-43

It’s all over for him. For me, a few more hours of this unspeakable pain, and then it’s over for me too.  I never expected to die like this.  Oh I knew I’d die a criminal’s death one way or another, but I always thought it would be with cursing and shrieking defiance to the end.  But then, who’d ever have thought I’d die beside a person like this?

Person?  Yes, and yet more than that, I’m certain.  Now for the first time, I’m suddenly at peace, and just because of him.  Imagine!  Hanging on a cross, blind with pain, and I can say everything’s all right!  I’m a whole person.  God, thank you for letting me die here.

Hymn 730: ‘Jesus, remember me’

‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,

Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom…’

(-Jacques Berthier)

  1. Mary tells her story: John 19: 25b-27

There were so many things I wondered about.  Sometimes I think we should have demanded more obedience from him.  It wasn’t that he was a bad boy.  Not at all.  If anything he was too kind, too generous, too involved, too interested in God.  We told him to be careful, to choose his words carefully.  I pleaded with him not to make the leaders angry.  I used to beg him not to make a spectacle of himself even though once I completely contradicted myself and almost made a spectacle of him at a wedding at Cana.  Imagine asking him to do something about the wine shortage as if he were some kind of cheap magician!  Thank God only the servants knew what happened.

I was so terrified when crowds started following him.  Foe every person that loved him I knew there were several who hated him.  I couldn’t bear their hatred for him.  I wanted to take him away and protect him from them.  He once got angry with me because of that.  He said I was asking him to deny his calling.  I probably was.  But I knew where it would lead.  I knew the end would be heartbreak-my heartbreak.  Oh, how I wish I could have protected him from this cruel ending.  How I wanted him to stop his teaching, stop his healing, stop his loving of every heart-broken creature he met.  But in my heart of hearts, I knew that would be asking him to deny who he was and who God had called him to be.  No parent has the right to ask their child to deny their very soul.  In the end all I could do was to be with him, love him, love the people that love him and join them in their grief.  My son.  My son.  Did your faithfulness have to bring you to this?

  1. A contemporary Christian: John 19: 38-42

Was I there? That’s a rather odd question to ask someone who is living in 2020!  20 centuries after the event! 

Well, I’ve got some questions of my own.  Tell me, why did it have to happen?  Why did God let Jesus die like that?  Why did anyone want to put him to death?  I’ll never understand it.  And yet, I wonder…would it have been any different if it had happened today?  Society is pretty good at putting goodness and love to death.

We know that peace is better than war, yet we wage war in spite of ourselves.  We know that the starving two-thirds of the world could be fed, but we hang on to our standard of living.  We know that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount could revolutionise human life, but we reject both him and his teaching.  We know we are caretakers of God’s creation, but we continue to pollute its waters, earth and sky.

Was I there?  Yes, I’d have to say I was, along with Peter and Judas and the others.  Things aren’t so different today than on that first grim Good Friday, except for one thing; we know about Easter Sunday.  The cross doesn’t just mean death, it also means victory, new life.

Hymn 345: ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’

  1. Where you there when they crucified my Lord?

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

O sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

  1. Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?…
  1. Were you there when the sun refused to shine?…

5. Were you there when he rose from out the tomb?

(-African-American spiritual)

The story of the cross:

I am the most familiar, most despised and yet the most loved symbol of Easter.  Once I was a fine young tree.  As I grew, I dreamed of what was in store for me.  I heard the older trees talking about how the woodsman would come and cut us down, how we would be used to build homes, furniture or even a ship.  I often dreamed of the time when I too would be taken down and made into something useful.  I rather hoped that I would become a part of a ship and sail off to see the wonders of the world.  How differently my dream turned out!

One day the woodsmen came and cut me down.  I was once proud, yet sad-sad to be leaving my fellow trees.  The man took me to the courtyard of a workshop where they began to shape and hew me.  They were good men and loved the touch of fine wood.  “This is a beautiful wood,” one of them said.  “I wish I could make it into a chest for my wife.” But when they had finished, they threw me on top of a pile of other rough cut logs.  A man came in all in a rush, looked about, spied me, ad said, “This one will do”, as he hailed me out of the pile.

“At last,” I thought, “my time has come.  I wonder what I am to become?” The man did not seem to take pride in his work.  He was only bent on getting the job done as quickly as possible, as if it were a job he didn’t want to be doing.  When he had finished, he called to another workman to help carry me.  I didn’t seem to be anything, just two pieces of wood.  Perhaps there were other pieces that needed to be fitted.

The carpenter carried me to a courtyard, where an officer, after glancing at me, said “It will do.” He ordered two other guards to carry me through the streets, pushing through the crowd that had grown in the square, until they stood in front of a Man-beaten and bent in pain.  The guards thrust me at him but another called out, “No! We barely got him this far.  He’ll never be able to carry this.  We’ll be here all day.  You, hey, you, pick this up and carry it.  By order of the Emperor.” The man from the crowd, Simon of Cyrene they called him, picked me up and began to carry me, followed by the jeering crowd, out of the city to a place called Golgotha.

Then and only then did I realise the “useful” thing I had become.  They laid me on the ground and after laying the tired and beaten Man upon me, they hammered nails into his hands and feet.  The guards groaned as they hoisted me up and set me into a freshly dug hole.  I was the cross.

Prayer

Loving God,

we thank you for Jesus

and that he would stop at nothing,

not even death on a cross,

to show that you love us,

that you seek to forgive us,

and that you promise to be with us always.

May we always remember the depth of that love!

Jesus, you carried our sins in your own body on the tree

so that we might have life.

Let us go out to keep our vigil at the cross,

at your feet,

in your name

Amen.

Hymn 342: ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’

  1. When I survey the wondrous cross

On which the Prince of glory died,

My richest gain I count but loss,

And pour contempt on all my pride.

  1. Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast

Save in the death of Christ my God;

All the vain things that charm me most,

I sacrifice them to his blood.

  1. See from his head, his hands, his feet,

Sorrow and love flow mingled down;

Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,

Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

  1. Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were a present far too small

Love so amazing, so divine

Demands my soul, my life, my all.

(-Isaac Watts)

To close with the story of the lily:

I am the lily.  Once long ago I bloomed in a garden belonging to Joseph of Arimathea.  It was a quiet evening when they came.  Joseph and some women, weeping women, came with a cart carrying the body of a dead Man.  Joseph himself tenderly carefully wrapped the linen sheet about the body and carried it into the tomb, a cave he had just carved right into the hillside.  As he rolled a rock over the entrance, Pilate’s guard arrived insisting that a seal be placed on the entrance and a guard posted.  With the guard in place, the others quickly left.  Silence returned.

But I am not a symbol of sadness; I am a symbol of hope.  Because you see, the story is not yet over.  There is more to come.  And I will wait here by the entrance to the tomb to greet my Lord on Easter morning.

Rev Barbara Allen

Good Friday, 10.4.20


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