Presiding Bishop preaches on Good Friday at Salisbury Cathedral

Posted Apr 6, 2015

Good Friday
3 April 2015
Salisbury Cathedral, 1:30 pm

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

This is a journey to the mountain of death. Actually, two journeys shape this day’s remembrance. Both undergird and shape our own life’s journey to the last offering of breath.

Isaac is the long-awaited son of Abraham, the beloved heir on whom all hope is founded – and God’s test is to ask his life – oh cruelest command! What does Sarah have to say of the fate of this son for news of whom she and Abraham once laughed?

Jesus, too, is the long awaited one, who claims his mission in the already-present and still-coming kingdom. Mary’s heart is pierced as she discerns glimmers of his likely fate.

There is a donkey for each, and wood for the sacrifice. Abraham and Isaac walk on together to the mountain where God provides. Jesus goes alone, carrying the wood himself to the mount of death near where God abides. Each beloved son is bound and laid on wood, to await death. Abraham’s slaying hand is stayed by holy messenger, and Isaac replaced by a thicket-caught ram.

For the other, later son, God’s own, unholy forces collude – Judas with a dementor’s soul-sucking kiss, backroom dealing, intrigue of empire, official fearful self-defense, even a functionary’s public hand-washing – it is neither the first nor last time official forces will slay an innocent. This sacrificial lamb is caught by the head in a thicket of thorns, beaten, bloodied, bruised, and pierced – it appears there will no unblemished offering here. Yet the one who makes this sacrifice is whole inside, in ways that turn back the bile and the vile indignities and cruelty. This is the prince of peace, even in the face of all the outward violence.

That peace has already had some import, for a few women from his circle, and one young well-loved disciple, have the courage to stand and watch from a distance, like Abraham’s two young men brought to watch him make his offering. But all the others have slunk away, afraid for their own lives, avoiding any thing that intimates consorting with an enemy of Rome.

For Jesus is executed by the Empire, not the Jewish leaders. They have been much slandered through the centuries. This account of John’s is the most vehement of all, for it was written for a community of The Way, early followers of Jesus’ who were being pushed out of the synagogues for their new understandings, loyalty, and worship of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a family fight, ugly as sin, much like Jacob and Esau struggling over their inheritance. Jonathan Swift put it well when he noted that “we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”[1] We have more dying to do before we get enough religion.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, on his way to the Temple, he stopped to weep over the city.[2] He speaks of coming destruction because the people have missed what makes for peace – the dying to self and a growing awareness of the near presence of God in and around and among us. That is true religion.

The last acts of Jesus’ mortal life are focused on true religion. Jesus rejects violent retaliation in the garden, and heals the wounded slave whose ear has been cut off. When confronted by Annas, Caiphas, and Pilate, he lets his words speak for themselves – and goes like a lamb to the slaughter, unprotesting. His yes is yes, and his no is no. Let it be.

He binds his bereaved friends and family into a new community – his mother gets a new son, and his friend a new mother. Such a body, undistinguished by shared DNA, may be the most explicit mark of true religion: “See those Christians, how they love one another!” We have more dying to do before we get enough religion like that. Another gospel has Jesus receive one of those crucified with him – bringing him into the kingdom of God, where all are loved for who they are rather than what they do. True religion is that binding together in right relationship, love for God and every neighbor, honoring God with all we are and all we have, even life and breath.

The road Jesus takes for home is truer than a compass pointing north. He goes consciously, intentionally, to the portal of death, and when the body has reached its mortal end, his last breath is offered as sacrifice, returning it to God, the source of all life.

That is the model for the third journey – our own path to the mountain of dying. The true and holy God-ward road is this: to know ourselves as God’s beloved; to live life as a lover of every creature, human and not; to give thanks for all that is, seeking God in each day and moment, acknowledging that God is God and we are not. To seek out the beloved child of God in every member of God’s body of creation; to befriend and serve, honoring each with all we are and all we have; to keep dying, daily, to what is not loving or life-giving. Practice this, and we will go in peace to meet sister Death at our last breath.

We stand and watch with Jesus in his sacrifice. We give thanks in this feast of deliverance and we celebrate the wedding of all creatures into one body of God’s loving and redeeming.

Make us conscious, O Lord, of our violence and demented hunger for control. Heal us for love and greater life. Teach us your son’s peace and befriending, especially when we meet sister death. For you have gone this way before us, and though we grieve, we need not be afraid.

[1] Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711.

[2] Luke 19:41-44 and ff


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