Good Friday Sermon
Preached Friday, April 18, 2025
Friends, I have a confession for you. This is my first ever Good Friday sermon. I have been preaching and filling pulpits for 12 years, but I have never preached specifically on the cross, this event that we call The Atonement.
This boils down to me not being entirely comfortable with the idea called Penal Substitutionary Atonement - a theology of what happens through the death of Jesus. Penal Substitutionary Atonement posits that God needed a blood sacrifice in order for the wrath of God to be sated, in order for things to be made right in the world, and so God spilled Jesus’s blood in lieu of ours. This is probably the most common understanding of the cross found in pulpits and hymns. And indeed, I think it obfuscates the greater meaning and love behind the cross. Christian pastor and theologian Brian Zahnd puts it like this, “Are we to imagine that John 3:16 actually means God so hated the world that he killed his only begotten Son? No, imposing the primitive notion of a sacrificial appeasement upon the cross is… ‘the paganizing of atonement theology.’”
I know that even gently pushing back against penal substitutionary atonement is hard for so many as this idea can be deeply ingrained in us. If you’re not ready to move beyond it yet, that’s okay. And - we can also add to our understanding of the cross and how God speaks to us through it.
That’s one end of the spectrum of our understanding of what happened on the cross. The other end of the spectrum says that Jesus’s death was inconsequential - that it was just something that happened to him, because it’s what our cruel and harsh world does to people who preach Love, who start “good trouble…” And Jesus would have and could have saved us all without death on a cross… This also falls immensely short of us understanding the power and impact of the cross and Jesus’s loving actions for us.
You see - God was incarnated in Jesus, God-Enfleshed, Emmanuel, God-With-Us - we often hear those words at Christmas time when we marvel at the miracle of baby Jesus. This miracle is brought to completion though and at the Cross. God became human. Part of the human experience is pain, violence, grief, suffering, betrayal, death. God in Jesus experienced the full gamut of humanity. If God came to us in flesh but avoided the pain and suffering of the flesh, then that would not be solidarity with humanity, and would not capture the co-suffering and abiding presence with the oppressed and afflicted in our world.
To be clear, I don’t believe that his death on the cross was inconsequential at all. In fact, it’s extremely consequential and it means more than any of us - any theologian, any preacher, any person - has ever grasped or put into words.
There are many other “theologies” of the cross out there. With theologian’s names attached to them and Latin names. I still tend to find a home in the “Christus Victor” camp which talks about how Christ was victorious over Death through the cross and the resurrection. In breaking the bonds of Death on him, the bonds of Death have been broken over all of us - ultimately, as Death could not keep Christ - Death cannot keep us.
And yet… Our tendency, as humans, is to want to be able to explain what happened through the cross in one or two sentences. We want a concise and neat answer to use when we explain our Christian faith to others. These concise explanations do have a time and place - the issue lies when we don’t delve deeper. When we limit ourselves to one ONE idea of what happens in the Cross. The Cross is the culmination, the tipping point, of all of history, of all of Creation…why would we be able to summarize what happened there in an easy explanation?
Our God cannot be contained with one metaphor, one name, one explanation. The cross is the same. The cross is the great divide in all of time - before the cross - after the cross. Before - a world ruled by sin and Death. After - a world of hope, of resurrection, of Life.
Zahnd describes the meaning behind the cross like this, and I am going to read each thing that he talks about the cross representing slowly, letting how much the Cross contains to sink in for a moment:
“It’s the pinnacle of divine self-disclosure,
the eternal moment of forgiveness,
divine solidarity with human suffering,
the enduring model of discipleship,
the supreme demonstration of divine love,
the beauty that saves the world,
the re-founding of the world around an axis of love,
the overthrow of the satan,
the shaming of the principalities and powers,
the unmasking of mob violence,
the condemnation of state violence,
the exposé of political power,
the abolition of war,
the sacrifice to end sacrificing,
the great divide of humankind,
the healing center of the cosmos,
the death by which death is conquered,
the Lamb upon the throne,
the tree of life recovered and revealed….
And with this brief list of interpretations, I’ve come nowhere near exhausting the meaning of the cross, for indeed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is an inexhaustible revelation of who God is.”
I realized…that by not preaching on Good Friday, I was actually limiting my understanding of the cross. When I preach, I delve into the text, I pray about it, I meditate on it, I read books on it, I ask God to speak to me. I was limiting myself. I said, “Well, the cross isn’t that…” But I wasn’t answering what the cross was.
The Cross is more.
The Cross is everything.
The Cross is God’s Love showing us that there is no where that God’s Love will not take God, there is nothing God will not do for us, that God will even die - to save us, to save the world, to show us how much we are loved, to free us from Death for Life and Love.
There is no ONE explanation of what happens in the Cross - and so today I am not going to give you one.
What I am going to do is encourage you to listen to this story - whether this is the first time you have heard these events unfold or whether you’ve heard them a hundred times or more - listen with new ears, a new mind, a new heart. Listen for an aspect of the cross that you have not heard before. Listen for a movement of God’s Love that will strike you anew. Listen. Listen and hear more - more than you’ve ever heard before. Let yourself be moved by all this story contains. Let us be outraged by the violence. Let us be convicted for us still walking the ways of sin and death. Let us weep at the grief. Let us open ourselves up to how God has spoken, is speaking, and will continue to speak through the Cross.
And now…let us hear the story of how God so loved the world, that God sent God’s only begotten son to save us….
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