Sermon for the Celebration of the Passion of the Lord
Good Friday, April 2, 2010, 6:30 PM
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year C: Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22:1-11; Hebrews 10:1-25; John 18:1-19:37

For a long time now, John’s gospel has been for me the gospel of Jesus’ power and glory. In John, Pilate is on trial, not Jesus. Before dawn, Pilate is going back and forth between Jesus, the light and the truth, and the leaders of the people, standing outside in the praetorium, with their accusations, their lies.

But I’m not sure I want to think of John that way today. His depiction of Jesus is so very different from that of Mark, Matthew and Luke. John’s Jesus is in charge of everything. He really is a king, as Pilate wrote in three languages. He’s buried like a king too, not as in the other gospels. It’s just not possible to harmonize the Jesus of John’s passion with the Jesus of Mark’s passion. In Mark, Jesus dies alone, in agony, after the final cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” No mother, no disciple he loves, no choosing to give up his spirit. Perhaps because of its suffering, its powerlessness, the community of Evangelist needed to draw strength from a Jesus who truly reigned as Son of God.

Interestingly, John became the Good Friday gospel early on. Good Friday services started just as the Church emerged triumphant, in a real sense, in the Roman world. The success of the Christian religion was profound – and it carries God’s truth forward to our own day.

Perhaps another reason John became the Good Friday gospel very early on is that the Church began the custom, pretty widely by the end of the fourth century, of communion on Good Friday, from the Sacrament reserved for this purpose from the Mass of the Lord’s Supper the night before.

John’s account of the supper before the Passover contains nothing about the bread and the body or about the cup and the blood. What John had was a lively sense of Jesus’ presence with those who believed. His community had a fellowship of word, prayer and table where God’s power and presence were experienced and sustained.

The tradition of receiving Communion on Good Friday has been a complicated, controversial question for a very long time, before and since the Reformation. Those who don’t know this may be surprised to find that arguments seem to have been around for over 1500 years now.

With the Reformation, Anglicans took the question even further by celebrating the Eucharist on Good Friday, a practice that has not entirely receded in our wider community today. That said, my sense is that it seemed right to Reformation Anglicans to receive on this day –,as Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians – “ often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.”[1]  (Reformation Anglicans didn’t want to reserve the Eucharist and risk adoration.)

I was surprised in reading a survey of the question among Roman Catholic scholars how many of them argued against it before the Second Vatican Council.[2] But it seems absolutely right to me. Communion keeps both today’s scriptures and today’s public veneration of the Cross from letting any of us easily think we are going back Calvary today. Holy Communion is always Christ today and his work in his world now.

Those of you who hear me preach regularly know that I don’t speak about sin very much; I don’t worry about it. I think sin is real. I think genuine reconciliation, reconciliation born of real grievances with others is very hard; I’m not sure I’ve ever really experienced it in a relationship. 

But I think reconciliation between God and us or between us human beings may come only when we know what we are talking about, when we are honest about what we are talking about, when we try to approach the truth.

There is nothing more honest than birth, and life and death. Today we come together to feed on the life-giving Jesus, to receive nurture for our journey to death and eternal life.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.