6 April 2012

“In the desert, drowning”
Mark 15:33-37
Good Friday homily
6 April 2012


We of Nativity have been spending this liturgical year focusing on baptism … through Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany seasons we’ve walked wet, exploring how Jesus’ promise to us through the gift of baptism clings to us through the various times and places of our lives.
In the Lenten season just past, we’ve been “In the desert, drowning” … an ironic, perhaps paradoxical image, but one based on the text we heard at the outset of these forty days, Jesus’ temptation in the desert, in the wilderness, and then, Jesus’ return from there, the beginning of his ministry, leading his followers of every time and space forth from his own baptism with the words “The Time is Fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.”
Ah, but tonight … tonight the Kingdom of God feels a million miles away … time, standing still … and the desert, the wilderness, the vast inhospitable emptiness of life overtaken by death … overwhelming … as we hear Christ’s cry from the cross:

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

It is a word, so final, so empty, so barren … so much in the desert that when we consider it, the Word of the Son of God, crying forth his utter abandonment … friends, family, the world, the creation, and the Creator of him and of us all … God, in the face of the death of his own Son, doing nothing to intervene, nothing to rescue him … indeed, we simply cannot bear it.
Into this desert, this utter dryness of total abandonment by God … into this desert we are hurled … totally, coldly, painfully … so painfully, that there must be something there to make this word easier for us. A cup of cold water. The promises of God. The overwhelming love of God. The overwhelming love of God that transforms the dry, dead wood of the cross like the dry, deadness of the desert, and makes it bloom forth … bringing forth roses in the desert … and putting roses on the cross.
Roses on the cross. It is what we do, with that final, barren, empty cry of Jesus.
Gerhard Forde … he who was one of my professors at Luther Seminary … and the author of The Seminal Piece on The Work of Christ … in a volume auspiciously titled Christian Dogmatics … Dr. Forde loathed roses on the cross. His piece in what we lovingly referred to as “Christian Dogs” has several quotes in it, like these:

We have made the bitterness of the cross, the revelation of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a necessity for the process of salvation … as a result the cross loses its … character.
We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the cross. That is not the bleakness inherent in it.

“Putting roses on the cross,” then, is our way of taming the cruel awfulness of what happened to Jesus on it.
“Putting roses on the cross” is our theologizing the cross in various theories of atonement … thinking, working, trying, scrambling to come up with some way to understand, to explain, to yes, even lighten the monstrosity of what happened on that Good Friday so long ago.
Some of those roses are called “substitutionary,” meaning that we believe Jesus died to pay back a God so angry with us rebellious, sinful humans, that only the transference of that anger to his own Son will make it stop.
Others of those roses are called “Christ Victorious,” meaning that Jesus meant all along to go to the cross so that he could beat back death forever in a final cosmic superhero moment … Jesus Christ Superstar, if you will.
Still others of those roses, the vast majority of them, oh so sweet smelling, are called “religion.” They point to a Jesus whose death is so sweet, so lovely … so carefully memorialized on this day, “a funeral for Jesus,” roses upon roses upon roses covering up the cross, that by its very loveliness it cannot help but draw the whole world into a new way of living, a way of loving and serving and doing, a way of liturgizing and worshipping, a way of being that is ever-increasingly bringing the Kingdom of God to us all, right here, right now, on earth as it is in heaven.
There’s just one problem with all those roses on the cross. A huge problem.
They cannot, they have not, they will not take away the starkness of Jesus’ words from the cross.

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

At the end of it all, no matter how much theologizing one does about it, how much religion you live and love, how many good deeds you do … it still all comes down to this.
The Cross means, it’s all over.
On the Cross, it all dies. Theology. Jesus Christ Superstar. Religion. “Good works.”
Our clinging to ANYTHING that minimizes death, that makes it a little speed bump along the way of “every day in every way, we’re getting better and better.”
It’s all done, it’s all gone. In the desert, ALL IS DEAD. An empty vacuum.
On the Cross, even God is helpless before death.
No roses on this cross.
Only Jesus. Dying. Dead.
So utterly, totally like us.

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

His end. Our end.
In the end, God For Us is God As Us. He enters the desert, the vacuum, the darkness, and it takes him just as surely as it takes us.

And it is only then … only then, in the bottom, in the abyss, at the end, on this barren, rose-less cross … only then, at the darkest hour for us all, only then … does the faintest glimmer of daylight come … just as right before the sunrise …
… just as right before the Son Rise …