This is the sermon I prepared for Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., for Good Friday, April 2, 2010.

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Readings

Isaiah 52:13–53:12
Hebrews 10:16–25
John 18:1–19:42

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Prayer

Pour out upon us your Holy Spirit, gracious Father, so that we may contemplate in faith your great mercy in giving up your only Son to conquer death and to grant us the promise of eternal life through his resurrection. Amen.

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Message

He died with the weight of the world’s sin
bearing down upon him.
He died as one of us—bruised, beaten, broken—
suffering the most terrible punishment on our behalf.
He died at a loss, a terrible loss, a most grievous loss,
cut off from his Father from all eternity,
yet perfectly united with you and me
and all who come before and after us,
united in our sin—our original sin and in our all our daily sins.

There on his flogged and bloody shoulders
hang the secret thoughts and twisted desires
we hold most dear in the recesses
of the dark corners of our quiet desperation.

When we prefer to chase after our own little gods
rather than to bend our knee and worship the God who made us,
we place that sin of idolatry upon our Lord’s shoulders.

When we ignore the command to keep a day of rest,
to hallow that time because God himself rested from his labors,
then we add our sin of shunning the Sabbath
to the load our Lord Christ bears upon those wounded shoulders.

When we find within ourselves
the words that cut like knives and the actions that wound by design,
and then wield them as weapons against our parents, our children,
our husbands and wives, our neighbors, and even our enemies,
we gather up these sins borne of violence and disrespect,
of dishonor and violation,
and heap them upon on the pile that rises high upon our Savior’s cross.

We know in the depths of our hearts
what we have done to be mean, and what we failed to do out of spite,
what we have said in anger, and when we have loosed our tongues to punish others,
what we have thought in arrogance,
and how we dwell upon the ill and malice and malevolence and ignorance
that well up without end inside of us.

We know these things,
we know them in the deep dark corners of our lives,
we know what in means to be “in bondage to sin.”

But by the grace of God,
our Lord Jesus Christ knows all of this too.
He knows us and he knows in himself all that we are.
He knows the breadth and the depth of our sin.
And on the cross, he took on that burden
and he endured the awful wrenching hell
that is nothing more
than existence apart from his Father and our Father.
And with that awful knowledge, he died.

But by the grace of his Father,
and the love of their Spirit,
the sacrifice of the Son rescues us from the same fate.

And we know this because we have received a sign.
As St. John tells us in his account of the Passion:

…one of the solders pierced his side with a spear,
and at once blood and water came out. (John 19:34, NRSV)

These are the fluids that remind us
that Jesus was a man, born of Mary,
human like you and me,
as fragile in the end as any one of us.

Blood and water.
But not just water and blood.
This is the blood of the Lamb
sacrificed on our behalf to give us life,
as the writer of Hebrews reminds us:

Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence
to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus,
by the new and living way that he opened for us
through the curtain (that is, through his flesh),
and since we have a great priest
over the house of God,
let us approach with a true heart
in full assurance of faith,
with our heart sprinkled clean
from an evil conscience and our bodies
washed in pure water. (Hebrews 10:19–22, NRSV)

Blood and water.
Signs and seals and sacraments.
Through them,
through Baptism and Communion,
God gives us life and faith,
the guarantees of new clean hearts,
of consciences cleansed of evil,
and of bodies washed and made pure.

And just as we each have entered the world,
born of our mothers,
born in pain and with cries,
born amid blood and water,
we in the Church are reborn
from the spear-pierced side of our Lord.

His wounds have become our womb,
his labor gives us life,
his cries announce our delivery,
his blood of the sacrifice nourishes us
and his water of rebirth cleanses us.

St. John begins his Gospel with a hymn to the Word,
whose words we treasure on the day of our Lord’s birth.
Today they strike us anew:

…to all who received him,
who believed in his name,
he gave power to become the children of God,
who were born,
not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man,
but of God,”
of the life-giving blood and water
flowing from his Son. Amen. (John 1:12–13, NRSV)