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April 6, 2012, Good Friday, All Souls' Episcopal Church
He
hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the
afflicted.
(Psalm 22)
I have learned over the years as a priest and as a son
that we tend to remember what those especially dear to
us, our family and friends, said and did at the point
when they died. Their last moments are recounted in
every detail by those who were there. “She looked
over, smiled, and then turned her head away and just
stopped breathing.” “He took one last breath - - a big,
deep, one - - and that was it.” These are the things
we recall. These are the scenes which replay in our
minds in grief, when pain unveils reality and reveals
the face of love.
When our Lord Jesus was near the point of death those
who loved him heard his final words before dying. At
least two of his seven last sayings upon the cross were
words from the Psalms. The ‘Psalter’ (as we call the
book of Psalms) was essentially the hymnbook of God’s
people. Sometimes, like Paul and Silas beaten and
chained in a prison dungeon, people sing hymns while
under great hardship and trial, but when you approach
the suffering and complete exhaustion of Jesus,
struggling for each breath on that cross, you don’t
sing, but you may cling to what is most familiar and
comforting when you’re too tired to think, especially if
those words perfectly express the agony you’re going
through. The Psalms are considered the word of God, and
so it is not surprising that Jesus recited them; in fact
it sounds exactly like what he would do. In the most
profound sense, those words are his.
“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.”… “My God, My God, why
hast thou forsaken me?” says Jesus. These are the words
which begin the Twenty-Second Psalm.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art
thou so far from helping me? Our fathers trusted in
thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
… All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they
shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, “He
trusted in the LORD that he would deliver him:
… They pierced my hands and my feet. I may tell
all my bones: they look and stare upon me. They part my
garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.
A little further in the Psalm we hear these
remarkable words: He hath not despised nor abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his
face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.
Isaiah wrote: “In all their affliction, he was
afflicted.” (63:9) He hath not despised nor abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted…
We are told that when Jesus said: “My God, My God,
why hast thou forsaken me,” he spoke those words as he
had learned them. I was taught to give them what I was
told was the Hebrew pronunciation: ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama
sabachthani.’ We must remember, though, that Jesus grew
up in the Galilean provinces and spoke Aramaic. I’ll
never forget the first time I heard my Lebanese
Godmother who was born and raised in Cairo read those
words. I remember thinking how easy it would have been
for those standing there to hear him say “Eli, Eli,” and
think he was calling for Eli the Prophet, Elijah. We are
told further that some who heard what they thought was a
cry to Elijah were moved to give him a drink while
others said, “No, let’s see whether Elijah comes to help
him.” We see cruelty in the form of curiosity and the
twisted minds of hollow men who look to be entertained
in the arena of the world by the pain and suffering of
others. We also have what sounds exactly like the sort
of vivid, messy, detail we might expect to hear from
loved ones who were there and saw what they saw, and
heard what they heard.
In his first Epistle General, St. Peter writes of our
Lord Jesus who bore “our sins in his own body on the
tree.” This is one of several instances in which the
cross of Jesus is called a ‘tree’, and what is being
brought to mind here is the Law of God in the Book of
Deuteronomy: If a man
guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body
is hung on a tree,
you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be
sure to bury him that same day, because anyone who is
hung on a tree is under God's curse. This is
what St. Paul was referencing in his letter to the
Galatians when he wrote:
Christ redeemed us from
the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it
is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree."
Suspended between heaven and earth as if not fit to be
received by either the condemned paid the full price of
judgment, and our Lord paid the full price of our sins.
By him once and for all our great debt has been paid in
full.
If Heaven was a place
and someone could ask to see your papers in order to
ascertain by what possible merits you belong there, they
would find that you are ‘walking the streets of glory’
by the very merits of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,
the same merits by which all God’s children find their
way home. In fact, your photo ID is a mirror which when
looked upon in Heaven reveals the face of Christ. Reject
you and they must reject him. Your Heavenly birth
certificate, as it were, has been signed and sealed in
the blood of Christ. In Christ you are more than a guest
in the New Jerusalem; you are a citizen who has been
made a beloved son & heir of the Kingdom.
It has been observed
that in John’s Gospel our Lord Jesus speaks of his death
as an exaltation which draws all people to him, and of
course we remember how Jesus taught us that exaltation
and humility belong together as the same movement of the
soul. “Whoever humbles himself shall be exalted” says
Jesus, who as leader of the feast becomes the most
menial servant and washes the feet of disciples he calls
friends. The exaltation of the cross is the lifting up
of sacrifice, of the surrender through which all
resistance is overcome; a complete oblation, and the
perfect offering for sin, and not for our sins only, but
for the sins of the whole world.
The death of Jesus on
the cross concludes a faithful life of singular
obedience – a perfect life perfectly expressed by the
words from Psalm 31 which he addresses to his Father. He
says: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” He
began his ministry being tempted in the dry and lonely
desert where he refused to use his relation to his
Father to serve his own needs, where he would not
subject his Father to any test, and where he was offered
and turned down all the riches in all the kingdoms in
all the world because he remained faithful to his
Father. His whole life was an offering of love to his
Father. On the cross where he is lifted up we see that
love made visible - his love for the Father and his love
for us. He shows us that love is infinitely more than a
passing experience; it is eternal; it has no opposite,
it is what allows all opposites to be. It is the
fundamental nature of reality. Love is what is left when
everything else passes away. His wounds proclaim his
love.
In the Forty-ninth
chapter of the Book of Isaiah, the Lord God declares: “I
have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” We write
something on the palms of our hands because it is so
urgently important we must not forget. “I have engraved
you on the palms of my hands,” says the Lord. In his
Good Friday sermon the 17th Century Bishop,
Lancelot Andrewes, focused on this image as he
spoke of our Lord Jesus pierced on the cross.
He was
pierced with love no less than with grief, and it was
that wound of love made Him so constantly to endure all
the other. Which love we may read in the palms of His
hands, for in the ‘palms of His hands He hath graven
us,' that He might not forget us. And the print of the
nails in them, are as capital letters to record His love
towards us. For Christ pierced on the cross is liber
charitatis, the very ‘book of love’ laid open before us.
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