Good Friday (April 14, 2017) – John 18:1-19:42
John 18:1-19:42
In Whom We Trust
Good Friday – April 14, 2017
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Our readings today take us through a whole slew of human emotions.
We begin this day with a difficult reading from Isaiah,
a reading known as one of the songs of the Suffering Servant.
We hear of a figure, who endures suffering and scorn, who is despised and rejected,
who is acquainted with infirmity, held to be of no account.
The servant is wounded, afflicted, stricken – crushed with pain.
Somehow this servant generated healing and salvation and in the end the servant is vindicated.
Probably Isaiah meant to identify this figure with the Israelite people,
or a righteous portion of it.
But for long it has been associated by Christians with Jesus.
Particularly as Jesus the One who identifies with our suffering,
who joins himself to it, who knows what it is like to suffer.
The one who we cling to in our suffering, in the hopes that if we do,
we will be brought safely through it and raised from it – just as he was.
It is a difficult reading, but there is good news in it.
Then we come to the Gospel reading, and we don’t exactly have a suffering servant.
Far from it: we have a king in John’s Gospel,
who is magisterially in charge of the proceedings from beginning to end:
It is Jesus who knows all that will happen.
It is Jesus who asks the questions, not his interrogators.
It is Jesus whom the temple police fall down before.
He speaks of his kingdom and in John’s Gospel he reigns from the throne of his cross,
creating a new family from those grieving his death at the foot of the cross.
There is no suffering of Jesus here – in John’s Gospel, this is Jesus’ moment of greatest glory.
Into an unmanageable situation of betrayal, injustice, and violence,
Jesus is magisterially in charge.
For us, John’s Gospel provides reassurance that ultimately God is in control of the universe.
Although it often does not appear that way, John discerns that somehow, God is working.
That God can be trusted.
That everything is not always as it seems.
And that reversals can be expected.
Although this day ends with death and a tomb and darkness,
we remember that John told us long ago in chapter one that
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
On this day, we trust that – contrary to all appearances – God is ultimately in control and
that all things will finally come to a good end.
But I think we only trust this God because this God has, in Jesus, come to know,
like the suffering servant, all that we suffer and has entered into the suffering of
the innocent and the chaos of our world.
We trust that the one who loves us enough to come to us and suffer with us and
suffer with the innocent will, through this loving strength,
overcome all the darkness and all the suffering and all the betrayal and
all the injustice and all the violence.
We trust that a love this great is stronger than anything.
And so we say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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