Here we are, on the day we dread, hearing this long and very difficult story – the day Jesus hoped would not come, prayed in the garden that this cup might pass from him, but God’s will be done.
We have stayed with him this far, retelling the story of his last hours, the story we tell, and listen to, and contemplate, every year at Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday, Maundy Thursday, during the Stations of the Cross, the Good Friday liturgy that we are in, which is a continuation of this liturgy, the Triduum, that began last night with Maundy Thursday, and will end tomorrow night with the Great Vigil.
The story we tell is about upside-down power. It is about endings, and it is about endings that are beginnings. The story that we listen to over these three days is about God’s work in the world despite ourselves, God’s love for the world despite what we have done or left undone. The story we tell, over and over, is about God coming to be with us, live with us, die for us, and give us new life by defeating the power of empire and the power of death. About transforming the instrument of death, the cross, into a sign, an instrument, of life eternal. We tell this story, over and over, because we hear and acknowledge ourselves in it – the story is the story of the world, 2,000 years ago, and the world now. The constant is Christ. The constant is love.
There are moments, wonderful, true moments in the telling of this story. And I invite you to look again at the words we just read.
Soldiers come for Jesus in the garden at night, a safe place no longer safe. “Whom are you looking for?” Christ asks them. “Jesus of Nazareth,” they tell him. “I am he,” or “I am,” in the translation we read from today. And they fall to the ground. What wanted man hands himself over to the authorities? What enemy of the state says, here I am? Jesus’s friends don’t understand it any more than the soldiers do, and Simon Peter draws a sword. Jesus tells him, put it away. In the Gospel of Luke, he says, “No more of this.” At the hour of his arrest, Jesus commands peace, not violence, even to save his own life.
He is taken by the authorities, sent in front of important men, politicians and leaders of the people who believe they have all power, but Jesus, the prisoner, quiet, insistent on peace, is the one in power. It is not a power they recognize. We can hear the confusion in Pilate’s mind, an attempt to understand, his frustration as he talks with Jesus and attempts to comprehend him.
“What is truth?” Pilate asks Jesus, and truth is staring him straight in the face. Jesus answers not in words, but in his presence, in every moment of his life, until and through that moment.
Theologian Frederick Buechner wrote1:
“Somebody should write a book someday about the silences in Scripture. Maybe somebody already has… the silence that has always most haunted me is the silence of Jesus before Pilate. Pilate asks his famous question, ‘What is truth?’… and Jesus answers him with a silence that is overwhelming in its eloquence. In case there should be any question as to what that silence meant, on another occasion Jesus put it into words for his disciple Thomas. ‘I,’ he said, ‘I am the truth’.”
Seeing innocence and not treason, gentleness and not threat, Pilate tried to release him, but the people cried out, “If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor.”
“Shall I crucify your King?” Pilate asks and the chief priests answered, “We have no king but the emperor.”
And Jesus was taken outside the walls of the city – exiled – to be crucified.
But even from the cross, Jesus is creating new community, defining family, when he sees his mother and his friend standing together2–
“Woman, here is your son.” And, to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”
The day wears on. He is thirsty. He takes a sip of sour wine. And then, “It is finished,” or, in this translation, “It is completed.”
Jesus died on the cross – his work at that point was completed, but it is not the end. It is not the finishing – death is not forever, for him or for us, for we today know the rest of the story, and we look beyond the heartbreak of these three days to the resurrection that Jesus spoke about.
In the final verses today, we hear two more stories of grace, of hope, in the work of Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one, because of his fear, and Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night. Nicodemus, who back in the third chapter of John, sat on a rooftop with Jesus under cover of darkness, out of fear, seeking to understand what Jesus was teaching, and asking, in his own way, Pilate’s question, What is truth? And Jesus answered him then, this is truth: God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Nicodemus, Joseph, Pilate, Simon Peter, Judas – none of them understood what that meant, and none of them could, until they faced the cross.
What is truth?
I am the truth, Jesus will tell Thomas. I am the truth. The truth was born a child into poverty to parents fleeing the threat of violence. The truth lived among us, baptized in the river Jordan by a prophet who preached uncomfortable truths. The truth traveled with us, touching the untouchable, feeding the hungry. The truth broke bread with us, sharing fellowship with the rejected and the outcast. The truth challenged the world’s brutal definition of power, and gave himself to it, so that life would defeat death in the end. The truth said, love is the most important thing, even loving those who betray, who hate, who deny, who crucify you. The truth is on the cross, and the truth is in the empty tomb.
Amen.
1 From “The Truth of Stories,” published in The Clown in the Belfry and Secrets in the Dark, quoted at https://www.frederickbuechner.com/weeklysermonillustrations/2021/11/15/weekly-sermon-illustration-truth
2 Leonora Tubbs Risdale, homiletical commentary, Feasting on the Word Year C, Volume 2, p. 303
