Good Friday Worship Services - Seven Chapel Hill Churches (Worshiping from home)

“God is still God, even when God Dies” (John 19:1-16, 28-30)

Rob Tennant, Hillside Church, Chapel Hill, NC

Good Friday, April 10, 2020

*This message will be broadcast by Facebook and Instagram Live and posted to Youtube, but will not be preached to a live audience.  We – America, the world – are in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis which is causing people all over the world to avoid gathering in groups of larger than 10, and diligently maintain “social distance.”  It’s an effort to curb the rapid, worldwide spread of the Corona virus which can be deadly.

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            I’ve been thinking a lot about how unsettling it is to not be in control.  I remember September 11, 2001.  I remember trying to come to grips with images of commercials airliners flying into buildings.  That morning, I needed to do something, but there was nothing I could do.  I just got a bicycle and rode around aimlessly.

            No control; none then, and it seems, there’s none now.  This coronavirus has grabbed hold of governments the world over and locked all of us in our homes.  How long?  We don’t know.  It’s so strange.  Different than 9/11, yes, but, in one sense, I feel as I did that morning.  I feel I am directed by circumstances.  What’s happening in the world determines what I will do next and I have little say in the matter.

            Did Jesus wrestle with feelings of powerlessness on that fateful day, Good Friday?  He was betrayed, arrested, denied, tried, interrogated more than once, flogged, forced to march to the site of his execution, and then nailed to the cross.  It’s hard to grasp him going through so many terrible things.  He who fed thousands with a few loaves and fishes; he whose word calmed stormy seas; he who restored the sight of a blind man; he who brought Lazarus back from the dead; how could this happen to him?

            We Christians say we believe Jesus is God.  We claim he is the second person of the Trinity in human flesh.  One of our core confessions is that he is fully man and fully God, a paradox to be sure, but one we stake our own lives upon it.  OK, but how can God be bound, as Jesus was in Gethsemane (John18:12)?  How can God be slapped like some second rate, soon-to-be-forgotten political rebel, as Jesus was when questioned by the high priest (19:22)?  Don’t we understand God to be all-knowing and all-powerful?  How, then, can he be paraded around, from Annas to Caiaphas to Pilate to Golgotha, moved by the whims of others with no say in the matter?  John 19:33, the soldiers saw that Jesus was dead.  Yes, the Romans were very good at pain and death and when they killed you, you were dead.  But how can God die?

            In hauntingly beautiful songs, the musical Jesus Christ Superstar poses penetrating questions about Jesus.  Watch the 1973 version with Carl Anderson in the role of Judas Iscariot, but be warned.  This musical does not follow the story of Jesus from a Christian perspective.  Instead the characters challenge Jesus with raw, honest questions. 

            Peter, watching as Jesus, in chains, is marched away, plaintively sings to him, “I think you’ve made your point now.  You’ve even gone a bit too far to get the message home.  Before it gets too frightening, we ought to call a halt. So, could we start again please?”

            Then Judas, in the musical’s finale sings to Jesus as he hangs on the cross, “Did you mean to die like that, was it a mistake, or, did you know your message it would be a record-breaker?” We can be appalled at the irreverence throughout the musical, or we can acknowledge that Mary Magdalene, Peter, Judas, and the rest were probably as oblivious as the musical depicts them.  They didn’t know how they went from seeing miracles to the arrest to the cross.  Just a few days before, Palm Sunday, they rode the triumphant Jesus train into Jerusalem.  “Hosanna!  Blessed is the son of David, the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  How did it go off the rails so quickly?

            But, did it go off the rails?

            As early as John 12, religious leaders fretted that if people kept seeing Jesus as sent from God, rebellion would be provoked, and Rome would put it down with crushing force.  The religious leaders were the anxious ones, not Jesus.

            Then in John 13, Jesus predicts Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial (v.21, 38).  From the last supper to Gethsemane to the interrogations, Jesus is a step ahead of everyone, even when he’s in custody.  Does this story have a script?  Is Jesus the only one who saw it ahead of time? Who’s in control here?

            In the garden, the temple’s deputized toughs come to arrest Jesus.  With their torches, chains, swords, their steaming grunts, and muscles they stand to intimidate.  Jesus stands right up to them, and he, not they, does the talking.  “Whom are you looking for?”  They answer, “Jesus of Nazareth.” “I am he.”  When he says, this, the whole lot of them falls backward to the ground.

            The mob slowly picks up themselves, dust off, and dumbly stand there.  Jesus says again, “Whom are you looking for?”  With considerably less bravado, they respond, “Um, Jesus of Nazareth.”  He then says, “I told you, I am he.  So, if you are looking for me, let these men go” (John 18:4-8).  Again, who in this tragic story demonstrates poise?

            Rome was the political power of the day.  Religious leaders, temple authorities, the puppet King Herod all operated under the shadow Rome.  All had to appeal to the governor, Pontius Pilate.  So, Jesus was sent to him.

            Pilate is more confused than anyone else in the story.  Jesus tell Pilate his followers belong to the truth.  Bewildered Pilate asks, what is truth?  Pilate tries to get the crowd to appeal for Jesus’ release.  They demand his crucifixion.  It seems the holder of power, the mighty Roman, is more subject to the flow of events than the peasant from Nazareth before him in chains. 

            Pilate has Jesus flogged, a fate that, itself, brought some unfortunate prisoners to death.  Jesus survives. Pilate declares him innocent and tries to hand him back to the religious leaders.  They demand that he, their Roman governor, crucify him.  Pilate is afraid (19:8).  Powerbrokers always are, always afraid of how tenuous is their grip on the wheel.  Exasperated, he asks Jesus, “Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you” (v.10)? 

            Jesus answers, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (v.11a).  He doesn’t appear to be overwhelmed or out of control at all.  Improbable as it seems, Jesus appears to move this story along at the pace he has set.  All the actors move at his direction. 

            Even on the cross, Jesus arranges things.  He notices his female disciples nearby, including his own mother.  With them is also the man referred to as the beloved disciple.  He addresses them both directly, entrusting the care of his mother to this man.  Without any questions, both accept the arrangement.

            Then, Jesus knows the end has come.  No one else knows, but he does.  “I am thirsty” he says, invoking Psalm 69.  They soak a sponge in sour wine, stick it on a hyssop branch, and put it to his mouth.  The Psalm is fulfilled, and Jesus says, “It is finished,” and gives up his spirit. 

            Jesus, God in the flesh, is dead.  How could it happen? 

How could it not?  Sin brings death.  Death cuts us off from God.  All of us, every single one, sins.  The only way we can be with God is if our sins are covered.  Jesus willingly took our sins on himself when he allowed himself to be nailed to the cross.  He died for my sins and yours.  He gave himself up for us. 

            There’s more to the story, but this is as far we go tonight.  Jesus is dead on the cross.  He’s there on purpose.  It’s sad, but it’s also salvation.   We leave worship knowing God loves us enough to sacrifice himself for us.  He loves the world so much; he gave his only son.  If you believe in him, you will not perish.  You will have eternal life.

AMEN

           

A Good Friday Devotional

watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_NW8L5KVtY

God on the Cross (John 19:28-30; Psalm 69)

Rob Tennant, HillSong Church, Chapel Hill

Friday, April 18, 2014 (Good Friday)

            “I am thirsty” Jesus croaked out, as he hung, dying.  John says this fulfilled scripture.  Which passage?  What scripture was fulfilled when he said, from the cross, “I am thirsty?” Psalm 69:21.

            This is a prayer originally lifted up to God by David.  He tells the Lord his enemies “gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” 

            The prayer begins as the Psalm opens “Save me, O God, from the waters that come up to my neck” (v.1).  Before he was the king, young David stared down lions as he protected his flock.  Then his moment came.  He battled and defeated the Philistine giant Goliath.  As he rose to prominence, the king of Israel, Saul, became jealous and repeatedly tried to kill David. 

            After Saul’s death and David’s rise to the throne, problems continued.  He fell into deadly conflict with his son Absalom who accumulated a lot of power.  At times, Saul had armies hunting for David.  Later, it was Absalom with armies on the hunt.  More than once, David felt himself to be as good as dead, but God saved him.

            Jesus was raised by the carpenter from Nazareth, Joseph who was in the line of David.  As a ‘son’ of David, Jesus met the qualification needed to be the Messiah.  However, he lived differently than the great king.  Many of the Psalms are David’s prayers which God always answered by saving him.  David made it through countess treacherous scrapes and, in the end, died of natural causes.  In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus likewise asked God to take the cup of suffering from him (Luke 22:42).  This time, God did not. 

Both David and Jesus had enemies intent on killing them. In Psalm 69, David asked God to punish his foes. 

Let their table be a trap for them, a snare for their allies.
²³ Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually.

²⁴ Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them.

²⁵ May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in their tents.

²⁶ For they persecute those whom you have struck down, and those whom you have wounded, they attack still more.^[b]

²⁷ Add guilt to their guilt; may they have no acquittal from you.

²⁸ Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.

            How did Jesus react to those who assaulted him?  When the mob came to arrest him, Peter chopped off the ear of one of the men.  Maybe Peter was, in his own clumsy, channeling the warrior spirit of David.  As David smit Goliath, he would vanquish this brigand who brazenly attacked his master.

Jesus healed the religious leaders’ hired goon.  He replaced the ear Peter had lopped off and rebuked Peter for doing it (Luke 22:51; John 18:10-11).  When the soldiers whipped Jesus, crowned him with thorns, and nailed him to a cross, he prayed.  “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).  Jesus did not ask for God’s wrath to fall on his tormentors.  He asked God to not hold their sins against them.

            In Psalm 69, David lamented that they gave him vinegar.  Jesus fulfilled that line from David’s poem.  On the cross he said “I am thirsty.”  A soldier gave a vinegar-soaked rag.  The threads of Israel’s scriptures come to life and take on new meaning in Jesus’ story.  In the darkness of his cruel death, we see God in a new light. 

            David was a man of his times, an era of visceral, up close violence.  David’s prayer that God blot out his enemies may not sound holy, but it was honest.  The Bible calls him the one after God’s own heart; but not the Savior.

            That’s Jesus.  He fulfills scripture and makes scripture new.  The story changes.  How we see God changes.  People knew of God’s mercy and love prior to Jesus but he brought God closer than ever before.  Because of him, the path to God was opened to all people.

            “It is finished,” he said.  Then he died.  The old day was done.  Will we step into the new reality, or stay stuck in the old? 

Sometimes, do we, like David, want to call down curses on our enemies?  Like the religious authorities who killed Jesus as a matter of convenience, do we want to remove those who block our way or foil our plans?  Do we ever, like the Pilate, knowingly turn a blind to truth?  Does the rage-filled violence of the Roman soldiers pump in our veins?  Jesus hangs crucified because of sin – because of my sins.

God flooded the earth but protected Noah, split the Sea so Moses could pass through, stopped the sun in the sky so Joshua had time to win the battle, and closed the lions’ mouths for Daniel.  God is the mighty God of the whirlwind in the book of Job, the God praised by nature and the cosmos itself in Psalm 148.  We see this might of God in the life of Jesus and are awed by it.  But we see another side too. 

            God humbly washes the disciples’ feet, heals the guard sent to arrest him, shares truth with the governor trying to intimidate him, and forgives the soldiers abusing him.  We are invited closer to the God on Good Friday. 

            We come to this God fully clothed in sin.  God takes our sins on himself as he hangs.  Naked we stand before him.  He drapes a robe of his divine light onto us.  At the cross, we see God and understand how much it costs him to love us. 

             

AMEN

Good Friday - 2018

The Dispassionate Dismissal of Jesus’ Life (Mark 14:55; 15:12)

Good Friday Worship – March 30, 2018

            Recently, I heard someone say, ‘we don’t think about death and that’s the only reason we can live.’  It’s nagging at me that I can’t remember the source of this statement.  I find it fascinating.  The only reason I can live and not be constantly, obsessively worried about death is I just don’t think about it.  The idea of my own death doesn’t frequently cross my mind.

Is that right?  Maybe. 

Many years ago, I was swimming and could not get into the shore.  In my frustration at swimming against the rip tide, I uselessly swam against it, and thus magnified my frustration.  And fear.  I had a moment where I thought, “This is it.”  I started telling God, I don’t want this to be it.   A surfer saw my struggles and calmly towed me in. 

I don’t think about my death.  However, in moments when I do contemplate it, I feel ominous, horrifying fear creeping around the edges of my consciousness.  It’s not the only feeling.  I know I am a new creation in Christ.  I know that he gives life everlasting.  Imagining being in the physical presence of Jesus rapturously swims through my brain when I contemplate my death; not just any death, or death in theory, but my death.  Depending on the day, such thoughts bring horror or bliss. 

But, it is never casual.  All thoughts of death are serious.  All talk of death stops me in my tracks and commands my attention. 

Mark 14:55 says, “The chief priests and the whole council were looking for testimony against Jesus to put him to death.”  These religious leaders, spiritual guides, were charged with teaching the word of God and the way of God to the chosen people of God.  God, as Jesus teaches in John’s Gospel, is God of the living.  Yet these temple leaders, Israel’s pastors, easily talk of killing Jesus.  Without regard for the weight of what they were saying, they spoke of ending his life. 

Then, in Mark 15:12, Pontius Pilate says, “What do you wish me to do with the man you call King of the Jews?”  Do with?  In the kitchen, I wipe down the wet counter and then hold the rag up and say to my wife, “What do I do with this?  Hang it up or throw it in the dirty clothes hamper?  Do with?  Mechanically impaired as I am, when a handyman like my brother-in-law John is fixing something at our house, I fish a strange looking piece of metal out of his tool box and ask, “What do you do with this?”

Do with?  Pilate asks, “What do you wish me to do with [this man called Jesus]?”  Is Jesus a used up rag?  Is Jesus a tool?  Pilate seemed to see him that way.  The temple council seemed to value his life about like the animals they ritually killed in worship.  How did men come to the place where they could so devalue a life? 

Do we still do that?  Do men and women in our day and time still show a callous disregard for the lives of people they deem unworthy of their respect or esteem?  Every person shot in a violent encounter with police is a human being made in the image of God?  That includes the guilty criminal.  That includes the police officers who often get shot.  That includes the unarmed civilians shot by mistake, or by callous disregard.

Do we devalue life the way the Roman Pilate and the Pharisee Caiaphas disregarded Jesus?  Every school child or church goer or night club reveler or high schooler killed in a mass shooting in this country are human beings created uniquely by God; God’s image bearers.  That includes the shooters. 

“The chief priests and the whole council were looking for testimony against Jesus to put him to death.”  “What do you wish me to do with the man you call King of the Jews?”

These first century leaders acted with inhuman callousness.  The Pharisees and council members intentionally stacked the evidence, framed the testimony, and vetted the witnesses.  They manipulated the illegitimate trial to get the verdict they planned ahead of time – a death sentence.  Then they manipulated a man they hated – Pilate – to get that sentence carried out in the cruelest of ways.  It seems they never stopped to ask, “What are we doing?”

A few of the leaders did; Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and others saw the kangaroo court for what it was and called their colleagues on it, this miscarriage of justice.  These minority voices were summarily dismissed.

For his part, Pilate was only vaguely aware of Jesus.  He did not think Jesus committed a crime at all, and he was certain Jesus had not done anything worthy of death.  However, his motivation was not justice, but appeasement.  If killing Jesus would keep the right Israelites calm and quiet, he would kill Jesus.  And that’s what he did. 

Besides the dispassionate dismissal of Jesus’ life displayed by the Council of priests and by Pilate, both groups also exhibited an appalling presumptuousness.  Both assumed life – Jesus’ life – was theirs to take or give.  They would not grant Jesus autonomy over his own life; both assumed the authority to determine whether Jesus would live or die. 

This is authority is God’s and God alone.  Only God creates life; only God should take life.  Anytime human beings take the life of other human beings, they are wresting away from God what is His right.  To kill another person is the ultimate usurping of God’s authority.  The Council and Pontius Pilate both did this without a thought.  And we do it today.  The slate of violence in America is one example.  The treatment of entire groups of people as political tools in places like Russia, Syria, and North Korea is another.  The assumption affluent people have that they deserve to hoard a disproportionate number of the world’s resources for their own comfort knowing that people in the world are starving is yet another example. 

That last one is really uncomfortable because it lumps a lot of us in with Caiaphas and Pilate and Hitler and Putin and Kim Jung Un.  But in terms of sin, we are no better.  And our sins are not vague spiritual abstractions.  Our sins are real, tangible ways we add to the dying brokenness that’s swallowing God’s good creation.  If you or I sat in Pilate’s seat, I can’t say that we would crucify Jesus as he did.  But I know we are just as sinful, and if we didn’t do it the way he did, then we’d injure and reject our beloved Lord in some other way. 

Our callous disregard of death is the clearest sign that sin has made a disastrous mess of Eden.  God created the world and we’re doing all we can to destroy it.  I don’t know if we willfully mean to, but I know I sin.  We all do it.  So it’s all a stinking, oozing mess and we’re in it up to our waists and the slop is rising. 

How do we know the one who existed before the creation of the world came as a human, a real person, 100% human man?  Jesus’ willingness to come and embrace death.  He saw the mess we are in and he stepped right into it.  Jesus had prescient, prophetic vision.  He knew death was coming before he ever came to Jerusalem.  But he came.  Jesus had supreme communication with God.  If he had called on a legion of heavenly warriors, angels, they would have come and the crucifixion would have never happened.  He never made that call.  When he knew the crucifixion was inevitable and God wasn’t going to change the plan, he literally took it like a man. 

I don’t mean that in the macho way was use that phrase.  I mean, like any human would, he wept.  He cried out to God in agony.  He bled when the whip ripped up chunks of his flesh.  He joined us in our humanity.  He took the worst we have to offer.  He suffered mightily leading up to the cross and then hanging on it.  He feared death as much as you or I would. 

Jesus did it because he knew that God would accept his death as an acceptable conclusion.  The death of Jesus was the endpoint for all sins committed by all people.  Jesus knew God would receive his death in this way.  He knew he was dying for the sins of the world.  His death showed his humanity; it also showed his love. 

How far did Jesus’ love go?  The cross is the answer.  On Good Friday, weep.  Death should drive us to frustrated, scared, defeated tears.  Death is the antithesis of God’s design for us.  Jesus’ death is the great sorrow of history, the nadir of all time, the lowest of low points.  Weep.

And, receive.  I’ve spoken of sin, because that’s the story.  My sin leads to Jesus’ death and creation’s degradation.  However, before the story, behind the story, over the story, and in the story, God is working to carry us beyond sin and into His good graces.  Receive the gift of righteousness.  Grieve your sins but then receive forgiveness and rejoice.  Even on this day, quietly rejoice because in Christ, you are a new creation.  We rehearse and re-tell the Good Friday story knowing Jesus’ gambit paid off.  In his act of love and sacrifice, sin is defeated and you and I are rescued.  John reports that Jesus said at the end, “It is finished.” 

This mess we’ve made, it’s done.  Finished. The grief that exhausts us, the guilt that tortures us, it is done.  God’s love is accomplished in Jesus’ death.  We walk in the story knowing who we are now, now that Jesus has done all he set out to do.  We are the sons and daughters of God, his beloved possessions. As you lived your life and walk through the Lent-Easter season, know this about yourself.  You are God’s beloved child.

AMEN