“CHRIST CRUCIFIED FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS”
Saint John 18: 1 - 19:42
Good Friday: 25 March Anno Domini 2016
Father Jay Watson SSP
Holy Pascha, Easter in the Western Church, is the apex of the Christian calendar. This coming Sunday is the king of all Feast Days. But your Lord did not save you on the glorious day of His Resurrection. He saved you on dark, lonely, agonizing, and bitter Friday afternoon.
Being a follower of Jesus means holding on to the crucifix and not the empty cross. For the empty jewelry-piece edition of neckwear is also ubiquitous amongst pagans, heathens, and the trendy chic. But the crucifix with the corpus of our Lord is the genuine medal of mercy from Calvary that shows in representation, the image and event of/in which you trust and believe saves you from our sins. It is the crucified One in Whom we boast. It is the evidence of things now unseen and not provable by modern empirical science and technology.
Caiaphas, Herod, Pilate, Judas, and all the other unbelievers would have gladly gloried and worshipped a Lord Who would have come down from the cross and obliterated a legion of Romans. They would have bent the knee to new & better King David, a glowing and radiating Super Moses. But true faith sees its God hanging on the tree—spit covered, caked in sweat, bruised and wounded, seeping, oozing, trickling, pouring out blood; face marred and gagging for breath. That terrible tableau is what you glory in and what you boast.
Though not there that Good Friday, the Apostle Paul saw Him, and approved a cause for boasting. Though the Christ had many great things, divine things, to recall and write about, Paul did not say that he boasted of The Lord’s marvels, the miracles, the very creation of the cosmos; but what he did say was: “far be it for me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
As you commemorate with piety and reverence the Day of your Lord’s Passion, you should not weep for Him or feel badly for Him. The bloody tree (covered in His Blood) was His destiny and greatest moment. Before leaving the upper room on Holy Thursday He spoke: “now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him.” [Jn. 13.31] Again Christ said: “Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee.” [17.1]
With His Body given and His Blood shed at Calvary, the true Paschal Lamb gave His life for yours; His goodness for your badness; His restored Adamic Righteousness for your fallen “old nature” treason. By His stripes, His suffering and passion, by His Blood, and death, you are given life through forgiveness of sins. Weep not for the injustice done to Jesus but rather weep and repent and amend the injustice you do every day. Lament your own trespasses. Be the repentant thief He has made you; or the repentant adulterer, fornicator, liar, coveter, idolater, thief, murderer, and coward…be as the thief on his dying right hand that saw God in Jesus’ gory and mutilated body.
Why some and not others? We can’t answer that question here and now to the satisfaction of your fallen, sinful, and doubting “old Adam.” But for your new creation…the blooms and blossoms of your green vines watered by the Blood flowing down the crucifix to this altar from Immanuel’s veins, you trust the answer shown in the two thieves. The Word was in their midst. One rejected Jesus with scorn and mockery and first turned His head away from Christ. The other by the power of the same Holy Ghost, now inside of you, confessed that this dying, disfigured, and despicable looking victim; the paschal lamb slaughtered, was in fact His Lord and His God. The “good thief” was made good by the Good God/Man on that Good Friday.
He looked to the crucified and The Crucified One looked upon Him with absolving Love and the Gospel promise: “today you will be with me in paradise.”
Through your own crosses and pain; through your own dark black afternoons and isolated and seemingly abandoned trials and heartaches; you too look to the Crucified Savior and know that by His suffering and death you are saved in all ways that a man can be saved.
Today, as well as tomorrow and Sunday, and forever, you are in paradise, for He is in you and you are in Him.
“For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God.” [1 Cor. 1.23].
The power and glory of Good Friday. We preach Christ Crucified.
In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost
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