Good Friday (March 25, 2016) – John 18:1-19:42
John 18:1-19:42
Standing in for Jesus
Good Friday – March 25, 2016
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Every year on Good Friday we read the Passion account according to John.
And every year I assign the voice of Jesus to you.
Every single word Jesus says in the Passion account you get to say.
There are a few other roles you play, but mostly on this day you get to stand in for Jesus.
You get to say at the very beginning, “I am he.”
You get to be the one who advocates for the innocent by saying, “Let these men go.”
You get to say, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”
You get to stand up for yourself and speak clearly and plainly on your own behalf:
“If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong.
But if I have spoken rightly why do you strike me?”
You get to explain that your kingdom, the one you are a part of,
the one you are helping inaugurate, is not from here –
it is not like the reigns of this world based on terror and violence and intimidation.
You get to publicly say that what your entire purpose in life is,
that you came into this world to testify to the truth, to enact the truth, to embody the truth,
the truth that God so loves this world that
God is willing to come in person and die for love of it.
You get to compassionately create community in a desperate, difficult, grief-filled situation by
by giving a sonless mother and a motherless son a home together right at the
foot of the cross.
And you get to say one last thing before you die, that your loving purpose is fulfilled as you say,
“It is finished. It is completed. It is fulfilled.”
For no one has greater love than this, Jesus says earlier,
than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,
and in this story, Jesus lays his life down for everyone.
Everyone in the story is against Jesus: the fundamentalists, the liberals, the revolutionaries,
the collaborators. And he is against no one. He counts them all as friends.
When I put this Good Friday reading together almost 15 years ago,
I didn’t take the role of Jesus myself.
And there is a reason for that: it is because you now are the body of Christ.
You are Jesus.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus himself says about his own deeds,
“You will do greater things than these.”
For he is one, and you are many.
And so today you say, “I am he.”
You now with Jesus’s voice advocate for the innocent and the vulnerable.
You now drink the same cup of compassionate love that Jesus drank.
You now stand up for yourself as a beloved child of God full of value and dignity and worth.
You now inaugurate a reign based on love and mercy and compassion.
And you now
testify to the truth that God loves this whole world and every person in it by
embodying this truth and enacting this truth by loving this world and
every person in it.
You now overcome isolation and compassionately create community at every opportunity
even in the unlikeliest bleakest situations.
And having done this you will get to say with Jesus, “The purpose of my life has been fulfilled –
It is finished.”
You may not do it perfectly and when it’s finished it may not be a Picasso – and that’s okay.
Jesus can still work in you and through you.
Jesus will be raised, and his spirit now lives in you.
Standing in for Jesus on Good Friday brings home what Teresa of Avila wrote 500 years ago:
Christ now has no body but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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