Face Value
A Good Friday Sermon
Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last.
God is dead.
Humanity killed God…the God that is Christ Jesus.
Stop here.
Take note…for it is an incomplete thought that jumps from Hosanna, Loud Hosanna to Jesus Christ is Risen Today. Good Friday, dear friends of God, reminds us that it is only through the death of GOD that we find resurrection.
Good Friday is the day in the liturgical calendar when we stop and take notice that in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, God is dead. God dies. God is killed by the very people God promises to save. It is a tragedy of cosmic proportions.
But it is a tragedy we must face together if we are to make any sense of Easter.
This is, as one friend of mine put it, the fast before the feast.
I wonder how all this begins and where it takes us. Especially as Baptists. What is Good Friday for anyway? It’s not enough for us to mimic other Christian communities. We have to find our voice in all of this, our own way. And I think it starts with the realities of this life we all share and not a cosmology.
