Good Friday Sermon - Fr Charlie Annis CR

And they took Jesus, and led him away[…]and they crucified him

In the name of the Father…

I have spoken many times over the past couple of days about the “drama” of Holy Week and the “drama” of the Cross, and how this “drama” is not merely the story of “what happens to Jesus” but the story of our own life in Christ. And, today of all days, we might seem justified in our use of that word. For what could be more dramatic than the Cross of Jesus, than the suffering and death of the Son of God? And yet, listening to the text of St John’s gospel which we have just heard so beautifully sung for us, what strikes us above all is just how thoroughly undramatic a figure the Johannine Jesus really is. And not only this, but how cosmically unconcerned St John appears to be with what we have so often imagined to be the centrepiece of this great drama, namely, the suffering of Jesus.

How does St John tell us the story of the Passion? He tells it like this: “And Pilate took Jesus and scourged him…”, “and the soldiers platted a crown of thorns and put it on his head”, “and Jesus was brought forth…”, “and they smote him with their hands”, “and they took Jesus and led him away[…]and they crucified him”. In sentence after sentence what we are told is what is done to Jesus. He is scourged, he is mocked, he is led out before the crowd, he is returned to Pilate, he is crucified. What St John is at pains to show us, in other words, is that, in this final act of the Lord’s Passion, the Lord himself is not an actor in command of the stage on which he finds himself. It is not that St John’s account of the passion lacks for drama in any way, it is simply that the drama is so manifestly all on one side of the story, on the side of those doing to Jesus, and not on the side of the one who is done to, of Jesus himself, who, by contrast, almost completely disappears from view, who consents to be pushed off the stage of the drama of his own suffering and death.

And what is perhaps the most remarkable feature of all of this, is that, by comparison with the other evangelists, St John does not appear to be at all concerned with what we might suppose to be the Lord’s sole contribution to this drama: his suffering. As has often been observed, there is a marked difference between St John and the other evangelists in this regard. There is in St John no cry of dereliction, no anguished cry of abandonment from the Cross, no darkness covering the land, no earthquake.

What then are we to make of the surprisingly undramatic figure of Jesus at the centre of St John’s account of the passion, and of St John’s apparent lack of concern with his suffering, and what might all of this have to tell us about what it means to take up the Cross in our own lives?

What St John shows us, more clearly than any of the other evangelists, is that the fundamental reality, the absolute gravitational centre of the Cross of Jesus, is not the great cacophony of activity swirling around the figure of Jesus, but the Lord’s supreme and final abandonment of himself to the will of God, to the one he calls his Father; and that, compared with this all the rest — Pilate and Caiaphas and the rest — is just so much noise and muddle: the great self-regarding, self-defeating psychodrama of human sin. Even the terrible toll of suffering which the Cross exacts from Jesus, in St John’s telling, plays a distant second fiddle to this supreme act of loving self-surrender.

And by doing this, by putting this abandonment of Jesus to the will of God at the absolute beating heart of his account of the Passion, St John has, it seems to me, done us an incalculable service as disciples of Jesus.

Why? Above all, because, as I have been trying to emphasise in all that I have said this week, we too are invited to make this supreme act of loving self-surrender to the will of God, we too are invited to take up our Cross and follow Jesus; indeed, as those who have been baptised into the death of Jesus, to make this offering of ourselves is the one great task of our lives in Christ, and because all too often it is our misguided preoccupation with the drama and the suffering of the Cross which stands in the way of our doing this.

We look at the Cross, we listen to Bach, we hear the gospel sung to us as beautifully as we have done today, and the circumstances in which we
ourselves are invited to make this same loving self-surrender to the will of God — family life, monastic life, the deprivations and humiliations of old age and illness — seem to us so utterly undramatic, so painfully ordinary by comparison with the high spiritual drama of the Cross of Jesus, as to be unworthy of the name of the Cross. And so we flee from them, not because they are too difficult, but precisely because they are not dramatic enough, because they are too obscure a hill by half to die upon.

And what St John, with his uncanny sense for what really matters in the story of Jesus, does for us is to expose the fantasy at the heart of all this. In his telling of the story, there is nothing remotely dramatic about the Lord’s embrace of the Cross. The Lord makes the definitive act of surrender of his life, not through a heroic gesture of devotion or self-sacrifice of the kind we saw Mary of Bethany to be making, but through an utterly undramatic submission to the humiliating constraints of his circumstances. And oh how familiar those constraints are to us! What St John shows us, in other words, is that the Cross is always right in front of us, the only question is whether we are really willing to embrace it.

And what is true of the “drama” of the Cross, is just as true when it comes to the question of suffering. When we Christians talk about taking up our Cross and following Jesus, what we have generally had in our minds is not the wholehearted surrender of ourselves to the will of God that St John is interested in, but suffering. When we say that we have to be ready to take up our Cross and follow Jesus what we generally mean is that we have to be willing to suffer. And today of all days, with the Cross of our saviour before us, we cannot say that this instinct is wholly mistaken. For to wholeheartedly surrender ourselves to the will of God over the course of a lifetime, to allow the stubborn core of human selfishness in us to be slowly and laboriously rooted out so that we can make this infinitely costly gift of ourselves, will be painful, it will cause us to suffer. And yet how often is it true that when it comes to the final surrender of ourselves to the will of God, of which the Cross of Jesus is the supreme expression, it is suffering itself that becomes the obstacle, it is suffering itself that has to be prised out of our hands before we can finally let go, it is suffering itself that is the last great refuge of our egos.

And, once again, the enormous service St John has done us, is not to let us get away with this. What St John tells us by telling the story of the Passion in the way that he has is: “Do not imagine that the Lord’s suffering is what matters most about the Cross of Jesus. It is not. Nor is it what will matter most about the Cross which you are invited to take up. Next to the wholehearted surrender of ourselves to the will of God which is the one great task of our lives, the toll of suffering this great self-offering will demand of us, is a sideshow, a distraction.

And with this, finally, St John brings us to the brink of a truth about the Cross of Jesus which has always been almost too large for us to comprehend this side of eternity and yet which goes on quietly asserting itself nonetheless. Which is that if there is single bass-note to the Cross of Jesus, a single undercurrent that carries the Lord through the ordeal of the Cross, it is not suffering or pain, but joy.

Amen.