Good Friday

‘What are you looking for?’ We so often on Good Friday ponder the last words of Jesus that perhaps we miss the importance of his first. What are you looking for? Words Jesus addresses to disciples as they start following him beside the sea of Galilee (John 1.38).

Little could those disciples have known what it would mean to follow their teacher then; little could they have known, let alone have understood, the path he would eventually take, the path to Golgotha to be strung up, brutally murdered, the victim of human fear, jealousy, and lust for power. ‘What are you looking for?’

At the beginning of the Last Supper, we’re told by John that Jesus ‘having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to perfection’. When Jesus cries out on the cross ‘it is finished’, the Greek literally means ‘it is perfected’! This, John is signifying to us, this is the perfection of love. This tortured, battered, whipped and degraded body – a man abandoned by his people, by all save his mother, her sister and couple of his disciples – this, John outrageously claims is the fulfilment of all God’s purposes: the Word made flesh who came to his own and his own did not recognize him.

What are you looking for? Why are you here? What does this horrific form of state execution have to do with your deepest desires, your deepest longings in life?

To answer that question is one which takes a good deal of courage. Many, if not all of us, when asked the question will end up looking into parts of our hearts and examining such experiences that expressing our desires for the future will inevitably be tinged by our past. Perhaps it’s grief, a chronic illness, a broken relationship, an addiction that wastes us or a failure that haunts us – to answer this question will mean, as it did for those first disciples, that we must confront parts of our lives which seem irreducibly meaningless.

Someone very dear to me still lives with the death of her son in such way that to answer the question ‘what are you looking for’ seems almost too hard to answer, freighted as it with so much memory she seems to fall swiftly in scepticism or, worse, cynicism.

And yet this is the foolishness of which St Paul spoke with such passion: that the purposes of God in Creation have found their perfection on the Cross. This is not to say that Christ somehow performs a miracle here that sweeps all this away. Nor does this execution tell us that pain and suffering are themselves good. But what it does say is that God did not stand afar off.

The same God who, in Jesus, stares piercingly into his disciples’ eyes and asks ‘what are you looking for’ now looks upon us with the same love from the Cross: a gaze tells us that not even horrific rejection and shame, all our own failures and humiliations, even the ultimate vehicle of meaningless - death itself – can now separate us from God’s love.

When we venerate the Cross now, we are saying by our bodily action as much as in the words we speak that, in all the mess and pain of our lives; in all the confusion and anxiety of our age; in all that seems ultimately meaningless, Love has conquered. We do not need to fear when asked ‘what are you looking for’, but only in the shadow of the Cross to hold tight and hope: and not hope that’s pie-in-the-sky but a hope that, here and now, even in this valley of the shadow of death, God has gone before us.

This scandalous, violent death has become for us a victory: the gates of hell have been stormed; God’s judgment has been executed upon Sin and Death; the disobedience of Adam has been overtaken by the obedience of Christ; Satan is defeated.

Brothers and sisters, it is finished.