Suffering Servanthood – Good Friday Meditation
Selections from The Gospel of John – Chapters 18 and 19
April 6, 2007
Christopher H. Edmonston
Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church
There is an anonymous medieval prayer that I stumbled across earlier this month, one which in its simplicity has stayed with me.
Christ on the cross cries:
“My people,
what wrong have I done to you?
What good have I not done for you?
Listen to me.
Is it nothing to you,
all you who pass by?
Look and see if there is any sorrow
like to my sorrow.”
We adore you,
O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy cross
you have redeemed the world.
The prayer alludes to so many of
the ironies and paradoxes of Good Friday.
If indeed it is in the cross of Christ where we glory, then we must come
to terms with the pain and suffering of Jesus. The two go together: our glory and freedom; His arrest and
suffering. We must understand the shame
of this day, even while giving thanks for it.
We must continue to promote the funny math of grace, which to the
mathematician makes no sense: that in the
one cross of Jesus Christ the entire world is saved. Yes, that is the arithmetic of the gospel –
the imbalanced ratio by which God redeems the world. Jesus’ suffering is greater than we can ever
know, and greater than He could have ever deserved. The suffering he endured, the death he died, represents
yet another imbalanced ratio; another illogicality of Christian arithmetic. Once again we find ourselves very near the very
juxtaposition of our faith on this day: Jesus’
suffering is greater than he could have earned; while at precisely the same
time the grace he grants us by His life and through his suffering is greater
than anything we could ever hope to earn.
Or to put this in simplest terms:
He lost everything so that we could gain everything. That is core of Good Friday – and its
darkness only adds mystique to these ironies.
Like
the poem so wonderfully does, we are called on this day, and everyday really,
but on this day in particular to hold these statements in tension. Jesus’ word:
Look to see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. And our blessing: O Christ we bless you because by your cross
you have redeemed the world. Yes, that
is the both the bitter and blessed reckoning of our faith. Or, if you will allow me to quote David
Crowder – currently the reigning musician’s musician in the contemporary
Christian music scene: “When our
depravity meets Christ’s divinity it is a beautiful collision.” Indeed, from the middle ages to a Christian
rock song recorded last year, the cross has always been understood as the
collision point between sin and grace, between us and Jesus.
In
terms of academic and confessional theology, what the great minds of the
Reformation thought and believed, they understood that this cross was, after
the incarnation and the birth of Jesus, the second great intersection of God
and humanity. They also saw in the
cross, and in Good Friday, the intersection of the Old and New Testaments; the
old covenants and the new covenants. Written
in 1647 the Westminster Confession of Faith, in both the Shorter and Larger
Catechisms paints this canvass quite well.
Generations of children, Presbyterian children in the South memorized
these catechisms.
In
the Larger Catechism, Question 49 asks: How did Christ humble himself in his death? And the answer: Christ
humbled himself in his death, in that having been betrayed by Judas, forsaken
by this disciples, scorned and rejected by the world, condemned by Pilate, and
tormented by his persecutors; having also conflicted with the terrors of death
and the powers of darkness, felt and borne the weight of God’s wrath, he laid
down his life an offering for sin, enduring the painful, shameful, and cursed
death of the cross.
In
the Shorter Catechism, Questions 85 and 86 ask in succession: What
doth God require of us, that we may escape his wrath and curse, due to us for
sin?; and, What is faith in Jesus
Christ? Again, in the succinct and
troubling language of the England of the 17th century it answers
these two questions: To escape the wrath of God, due to us for
sin, God requireth of us faith in Jesus Christ, repentance unto life, with the
diligent use of all the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the
benefits of redemption; and, most importantly, Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, whereby we receive and rest
upon him alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the gospel.
And
there it is. The arithmetic of the
gospel proved. The equation of salvation
is balanced. The trigonometry of the
cross and the intersection of suffering and grace fully described. The cross atones for every sin, and allows
for our relationship with God to become one defined by saving grace, not
condemning death; a relationship defined by salvation and not
condemnation. And for this we should be
simultaneously overwhelmed by the fullness of God’s acceptance even as we are
left in a state of shock by the terror of
We adore you,
O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy cross
you have redeemed the world.
Yes, that should be our prayer of thanksgiving – our prayer of gracious acceptance and eternal gratitude. It is also the only offering of thanks which we ever can make.
Somehow in
this drama of Jesus’ last hours our broken world, our wounded world, is healed
and made whole. That is, after all, the
final plan of God in all of this – that our brokenness be mended, that the
incompleteness be made complete. As
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once preached in a sermon on Romans 11, “It was not human beings who accomplished anything here [on
the cross]; no, God alone did it. He came to human beings in infinite love. He
judged what is human. And he granted grace beyond any merit.”
What
was the purpose of Jesus’ suffering?
That we might have grace beyond any merit. And this was not done by accidental means –
no indeed Jesus saw it as his service; it was at the heart of his servanthood;
his suffering servanthood.
At
the heart of the book of Philippians lies a great confession and hymn of faith,
a confession that links Jesus’ service with our need to be served. A confession which links our need for
redemption with the redeemer. A
confession which calls us outside of ourselves and into the heart of God:
Do nothing from selfish ambition or
conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of
you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality
with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of
a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he
humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a
cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is
above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in
heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
To
the glory of God, and in thanksgiving to our Lord for his suffering service,
let us pray together the solemn meditation: