Good Friday

Here is tonight's sermon...

“Hope”

Good Friday 3/21/08

Passion of St. John, Hebrews 10:23

Faith, hope and love. Three words that are the mission of this church, and us as Christians in it. Last night we talked about “love”—how Jesus self-emptying love is the basis for his new commandment, “Love one another, just as I have loved you.” Sunday we’ll hear about “faith.” The word for tonight, on this Good Friday evening when we leave Jesus dead and buried—consigned to the nebulousness of non-existence as we know it—the word for tonight strangely enough is “hope.”

According to Dante’s Divine Comedy the inscription over the gates of hell reads, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” And if hell is a lack of hope, then the followers of Jesus were certainly a kind of hell as they watched their friend and master die an excruciating death, get speared, and be taken down from the cross and laid in a cold, dark tomb. Especially since it was done just at sundown Friday—the beginning of the Sabbath, precluding them from giving him a “proper” Jewish burial.

Their hopes had been dashed—unless perhaps we read between the lines of the gospels just a bit. How many times did Jesus foretell his death on the cross? Not just once—which would have been forgettable, perhaps—not just once but at least three times depending on what gospel you look at. Three times—and one was right before he clashed with Peter for saying, “Never, Lord!” He called Peter “Satan” then—that would have been memorable.

They likely remembered those predictions of his death. And then likely too they also recalled his talk of being raised on the third day—also mentioned by Jesus numerous times—straight out ad alluded to.

So perhaps, just perhaps, buried deep down under their fear, their disappointment, their sorrow, their shame and their regrets there was just a tiny little ounce of hope. Hope against hope. Hope beyond all rational logic, hope despite all physical evidence, hope in the face of disaster, doom and death—just a tiny bit of hope that what he said, he meant for real—not like in one of his stories or riddles. For real. Hope.

Hope that love like his could never stay dead. Not for long. Hope that his death accomplished what God wanted it too. The forgiveness of the sin of the world. Hope that the tantalizingly bright glimpses of the kingdom of God that he gave them through his healings, the feeding of the masses, and the new commandment to love weren’t just the rantings of a political or religious fanatic—but were instead a foretaste of the feast to come. For real. Hope.

Perhaps it was hope as well as fear that kept them in Jerusalem. Perhaps it was hope as well as tradition that sent the women off to his tomb early on the morning after the Sabbath. Perhaps.

For us, hope is just as tenuous. We have the end of the story so we don’t sweat the time between Good Friday and Easter morning. Our hope isn’t pinned on whether or not the rock will be rolled away—it was. No, our hope against hope is also based on what Jesus said way back then. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life—whoever believes in me though he may die, yet will he live, and whoever believes in me and lives, shall never die.”

We hope that the finality of death in this world isn’t so final after all—that we and all of creation will someday share in the power and life of the risen Christ. And that this sharing is so sure that we can hope also for bright shiny patches of the coming kingdom of God to show up even in the midst of darkest death.

So what does this mean for us as individual Christians? What is hope for us? It is a restless longing for, and a patient anticipation of our freedom from death and disease and destruction and disaster. Hope counteracts fear, it conquers apathy; hope dispels despair. It is the reason we don’t succumb to the chaos and evil and inequity and un-fairness that surrounds us. Hope is what we live in—a sure and certain hope that ultimately it is God who will overcome death and redeem and restore all to wholeness.

For us as a church, it is our mission to keep that hope alive—amongst ourselves. Telling each other the old, old story of that first hope and our hope over and over again. It is also our mission to take that story out into the community. To tell people who are ravaged with disease, hunger, addiction, war, environmental damage, unemployment, acquisitiveness, or the jaded nature of our modern world—to tell people that there is hope, that as long as there is a God in heaven, there is hope in the renewing of the creation—the reversal of what is backwards, the righting of what is wrong, the wholeness of what was broken. There is hope.

There is hope. And we’ve pinned that hope to the cross.