I love Good Friday, from the paradox hidden in the word “good” to the shadows and somber solemnity of our service. I preach on Good Friday, but “preach” is too strong a word. “Homily” is even too grandiose. I meditate, and briefly — or like a docent in a museum, with just a few words I point to the wonder, the horror, the beauty and majesty. May I just sigh, or shudder. That would be a good enough sermon. Maybe the choir will bail me out with Gilbert Martin’s “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” As I ponder and prepare, I’ll listen to that moving crucifixion moment in Jesus Christ Superstar. I'm going to ask my musicians to play, just after I speak or maybe later on where it fits, "John 19:41," that elegiac, emotionally powerful piece from the end of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical.

At our church, we do the Gospel reading in stages, gradually extinguishing lights and then candles until we are immersed in total darkness. A childhood friend of mine, who lives in another city, called the church last year at the end of the service he was livestreaming, saying "I can't see anything!" Indeed. We can't see. We can hardly speak. On Good Friday, more than any other day, we are humbled by our inability to say anything, just as Jesus was all but silent as he hung for hours. On this day, more than any other, we realize we do not need to make the Bible relevant or to illustrate it. We can and must simply trust the reading to do the work it has done for two thousand years. 

The brilliant theologian Robert W. Jenson (who just died in September), after assessing the historic doctrines of the atonement, quite shrewdly concluded:

"The Gospel’s passion narrative is the authentic and entire account of God’s reconciling actions and our reconciliation, as events in his life and ours. Therefore what is first and principally required as the Crucifixion’s right interpretation is for us to tell this story to one another and to God as a story about him and about ourselves.”

I just finished reading Fleming Rutledge's amazing The Crucifixion (which I read through day by day as part of my Lenten discipline). A highlight of this read was her citation of an astonishing sermon by Melito of Sardis, maybe around the year 190, which includes this:

"The Lord suffered for the sake of those who suffered, was bound for the sake of those imprisoned, was judged for the sake of the condemned, and buried for the sake of the buried. So come, all families of people defiled by sin, and receive remission. For I am your remission, I am the Passover of salvation, I am the Lamb sacrifice for you, I am your ransom, I am your life, I am your Resurrection, I am your light. I am your salvation. I am your king. I lead you toward the heights of heaven, I will show you the eternal Father, I will raise you up with my right hand."

1. The crucifixion I count as my favorite (partly because Karl Barth kept a print of it above his desk) is by Matthias Grünewald for the Monastery of St. Anthony in Isenheim, whose ministry was to sufferers of the plague; I try to imagine medieval women and men suffering horrific skin diseases looking upon Jesus’ lacerated body, pitted with pricks and sores.
   
   
2. The recently opened (and wonderful) National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington features a Pieta — Mary holding her crucified son — by David Driskell. After 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered by two white men (who were acquitted) in Mississippi, Driskell was so disturbed by the killing, and Till's mother’s very public grief, that he created “Behold Thy Son.” 
   
   
3. I continue to be struck by the first artistic depiction of the crucifixion we have, which is the mockery in the Alexamenos graffito, an image of a Roman convert saluting the crucified Christ pictured as a donkey/ass. The self-evident ridicule is pitch-perfect — back then, but certainly today as well as the crucified Lord is stranger than ever in our culture.
   
   
4. Finally, there is the harrowing scene in Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence (and as of last year, in Martin Scorsese’s film) about missionaries to Japan under persecution. Fr. Rodrigues is told by the magistrate he must trample upon an icon of Christ to save his flock:
   
   “The priest raises his foot. In it he feels a dull, heavy pain. This is no mere formality. He will now trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man. How his foot aches! And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: ‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into the world.’ The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.”