 |
| So often we describe God as Almighty, but today we see God All-Vulnerable. |
©2025 The Rev. Seth Olson
This sermon was preached on Good Friday at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles in Hoover, AL. A video of it may be found here.
Holy God, may my words be your words and when my words are not your words, may your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.
We call this day Good, but truthfully… it feels anything but good.
On this day, we read the Passion of Our Lord. We hear the betrayal, the violence, the abandonment, and the silence. We stare into the mystery of a God who chose not to escape suffering, but to enter it. Not to crush evil with a sword, but to expose it on a cross.
Even though I have heard this story so many times, still I feel the tension. I know the story, and yet… my heart protests. At the first church I served, a group of children heard the Passion story on Palm Sunday. One of them replied, “Wait, what? Jesus died?!” Like that little one, I too am in disbelief. Couldn’t it have gone another way?
Why this way? Why the flogging, the nails and the borrowed tomb?
Why this kind of love?
The short answer? Because this is the world we live in.
We live in a world where the innocent suffer—not only back then, but also now. We live on a planet where people are mocked, manipulated, and murdered. Where powerful systems silence truth. Where even the faithful are tempted to look away when things get too painful.
Jesus didn’t die in spite of our world. He died in it. Because of it. He died for it and for us, but he died because all too often that’s what we do to truth tellers.
Good Friday is not the story of God demanding suffering—it is the story of God choosing solidarity with the suffering of this world.
The crucifixion shows us something no throne ever could: the full extent of God’s love. Not a sanitized, distant, picture-perfect kind of love. But a love that bleeds. A love that absorbs rejection. A love that stays—even beyond the barriers and breaking points.
Some in our society scoff at this love—calling it weak, sentimental, idealistic. In response, I find myself wrestling with the following question: What does this life-giving love—this love that may lead to my death—what does this love have to do with me, with us?
To answer I could theologize—atonement theories, historical layers, and political intrigue. I could stay up in my head trying to explain it away, but the truth is simpler, and harder: Jesus died because this is what love looks like when it refuses to give up. When it costs something. When it stays beyond the bitter end. When love bears the weight of the entire cosmos within a mortal body nailed to a tree.
This truth of the Cross can’t make sense up here (in the brain), certainly not in the survival mind, which remains hell-bent on supremacy, control, esteem, and a host of other markers deemed virtuous by the world’s systems. Instead, the truth of the Cross is venerated, is made real so to speak, when we align ourselves not with the power-tripping principalities of this fallen world, but when we seek solidarity with the least, the lost, and the unloved—when we align ourselves with Christ Jesus who hides in plain sight, in family, neighbor, and yes, even enemy.
Through the Cross we experience a holy camaraderie not just with those we like or think of fondly, but with every human being. In a few minutes, we will experience this kinship by praying for the needs of the entire world. And, specifically you will notice a new section has been added to our solemn collects in which we lift up our Jewish siblings. We specifically will pray for them because all too often during this holy week Christians have harmed Jewish neighbors. For Jesus, a faithful Jewish man, was not ascending the Cross to start an exclusive religion—Jesus endured the Cross to draw the whole cosmos near to express there is no separation from the Divine—pain, power, or persecution won’t stop God from inviting us close, to embrace us—all of us.
And, before Jesus was crucified, before the Cross was even erected, soldiers forced Our Lord to carry his own torture device. I bet somewhere in your life you too are carrying a cross.
It might be grief. Or shame. Or exhaustion. Or loneliness so deep it aches.
This day says: God knows that burden.
This day says: Jesus has walked your road.
This day says: You are not alone. You’ll never walk alone!
We so often speak of God as Almighty. But today, we also see God as All-Vulnerable. God does not dominate from on high. God hangs low from a tree. And yet—this is not the end.
Because the Cross is not God's final word. It was not the proverbial period that the authorities thought they were placing at the end of the sentence that was Jesus’ life. For where the world tried to place an exclamation point of death, God instead placed an ellipses, a "to be continued," a mysterious pause that stretches onward. Because Jesus’ outstretched arms nailed to a tree are still reaching toward you and me and this whole broken world… and the entirety of the cosmos… offering not answers, but embrace. As a beloved prayer from our Tradition puts it: “Jesus stretched out his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross, that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace" (The Book of Common Prayer, 101).
So come close, beloved apostles. Not to understand, but to behold. Not to explain, but to weep. Not to solve, but to be held.
This is the day when the whole world falls apart. And somehow, in the shadow of the Cross, we find not despair… but truth. We find not condemnation… but compassion. We find not the absence of God… but the fullness of love.
That’s what makes this Friday Good.
Because even here—especially here—nothing can separate us from the love of God…
Not sin…
Not death…
Not even a cross!
No comments:
Post a Comment