A Jesus Story--Sermon for Good Friday, April 18, 2025

Sermon for Year C, Good Friday, April 18, 2025

Scripture: Luke 23:13-25, 39-49       

³²Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. ³³When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. ³⁴Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’ 

And they cast lots to divide his clothing. ³⁵And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ 

³⁶The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, ³⁷and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’  ³⁸There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’       

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ ⁴⁰But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? ⁴¹And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ ⁴²Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ ⁴³Jesus replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

               ⁴⁴It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, ⁴⁵while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. ⁴⁶Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last. 

⁴⁷When the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, ‘Certainly this man was innocent.’ ⁴⁸And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. ⁴⁹But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.

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On New Year’s Eve, 1996, I began my seminary cross-cultural experience. 

Cross cultural was a requirement for Masters of Divinity students at my seminary, PLTS.  There were a bunch of choices, but all but one were in parts of the continental US.  I wanted something truly cross-cultural, so it was either Shismaref, Alaska, or Quetzeltenango, Guatemala. 

As thrilling as the north coast of Alaska sounded…in January…I went with Guatemala. The group of a dozen of us were enrolled in three weeks of intensive Spanish language school, and each of us stayed with a different family in the town, Quetzeltenango, called Xela for short.

I hadn’t done a lot of trips abroad at that point, and neither had most of my classmates.  Contributing to our excitement, and trepidation, was the fact that the country was just two days into the end of its 36 year civil war.  The peace accords were signed on December 29, and Guatemalans and American seminarians alike were wondering whether they would hold.

With that on our minds, New Year’s Eve might not have been the best time to arrive.  See, in Guatemala, holiday means fireworks.  Lots and lots of fireworks.  More than this neighborhood when the Chiefs win the Super bowl level of fireworks.  When we got to Xela, there were little kids wandering around with belts of firecrackers just slung over their shoulders.  In the center of town, there was a shopping area covered by an atrium roof.  While we were standing in the center of it, on New Year’s Day, someone shot a bottle rocket into the building.  My friend Craig will never be the same.

We were nervous, and even a little scared…we were privileged.  We were all middle class, white grad school students, from a country that until then had not experienced much political violence.  Since the previous century, really.  Certainly nothing like what Guatemala had experienced for well over three decades. They had been living under a threat that we had never known.  People who can remember the sixties know something of what it is to wonder if you will be attacked for speaking out for peace and justice, but we had never known that.

Until now. This is the first time in my lifetime, and perhaps in some of yours, that we have truly wondered whether it was safe to speak out, and whether our citizenship and the US Constitution will be enough to protect us from our own government. 

And I will say again that it is privilege that creates the sense of surprise and shock around this moment.  There are people across the world who have known nothing else for their lifetimes.  I say that not to minimize what is happening around us, but to recognize the poignancy of this moment.  Our ideals have held until now, at least for most of us.  For our neighbors of color, our immigrant neighbors, and others, it’s a different story.  They’ve already known what it is to live under the threat of state sponsored violence. 

But for the rest of us, this feels new.  Like “little kids walking around with firecracker belts” new.  We don’t know where to turn.  We struggle to figure out what’s happening and we keep trying to figure out who is coming to save the day.

Who is coming to save us?  It doesn’t seem to be any of the people we expect.

And it probably won’t be any of the people we expect, and that’s what is SO vital to understand tonight.

This feels like a new story, but it’s not, is it?  It’s an old story, one we’ve been reading on this night for however many years we’ve been Christian.  We’ve just maybe never seen it from this side before and that’s unsettling.

This is a Jesus story, right?  Not a Sunday School Jesus story, where Jesus does a healing or talks about salt and light.  But the Jesus story—the story of how God became incarnate in order to suffer alongside us because of the rapaciousness of certain religious and political actors.

The story of Jesus is the story of someone who grew up in a community threatened and at times even terrorized by rulers far away from them in every way, and by authorities closer to home.  The Roman Empire exacted obscene wealth from its territories in the form of an unfair tax structure and an exploited labor force.  Sound familiar?

Add to that the machinations of religious leaders more concerned with their own power than with following God’s command to care about the poor and the needy rather than pomp and ceremony, and you have the social and political climate in which Jesus grew up, the world in which he preached and taught and healed.  And we can begin to understand what brought him to Jerusalem to stand before the leaders of the empire and the religious leaders.

This is the Jesus story.

This is the gospel story.  The story of a God willing to suffer and even die to show us another way. 

It’s not an easy story.  There will always be those who prefer to stay home on Good Friday.  We don’t want to confront what this day teaches: that following Jesus means—as he told us it would—taking up our own crosses to oppose “the powers of this world that rebel against God.”

We make that promise in baptism—at least we do if we’re baptized under the new hymnal.  We’ll make it again tomorrow night as we affirm our baptism.  We’ll promise to oppose “the powers of this world that rebel against God.”

And we’ll mean it.  But we’ll also be slyly looking around to see if someone else is really riding in to dispatch the powers. 

Someone big and strong, maybe.

Someone with a lot of authority?

Here’s where the old story becomes new again.  None of those people are coming to save us.  None of them came to save Jesus.  Most of them came to condemn Jesus.

Who stood for the truth in this age old story?

A thief.  One thief derided Jesus, but the other asked him for mercy and recognized his sovereignty

A Roman soldier.  A centurion, at the foot of the cross, declares, “Surely this man was innocent.”

Truth still exists.  Goodness still exists.  The gospel of Jesus Christ—the story of a God who loves us to death—is still the greatest story ever told.

But the ones coming to tell us that story may not be the ones we expect.  They probably won’t be religious or political authorities.  They might look differently than we expect.  They might look like us.