Sermon for Good Friday, 2025

Good Friday, 2025: The Celebration of the Lord’s Passion
ISAIAH 52:13-53:12; PSALM 22; HEBREWS 4:14-16, 5:7-9; JOHN 18:1-19:42

let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness

Cicero, the Roman statesman and lawyer, didn’t want Roman citizens to be at all concerned about crucifixions; he didn’t want Roman citizens to think about them, see them, or hear about them. They were a trauma meant not for the ruling class, but rather for the ruled. “Let the very word ‘cross’ be far removed from not only the bodies of Roman citizens,” he wrote, “but even from their thoughts, their eyes, and their ears.”

Crucifixions weren’t uncommon things. The Romans, over time and across the empire, crucified between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand people. Closer to Jerusalem, Pilate was known for his willingness to have people crucified from time to time; during uprisings and rebellions in Judea, thousands were crucified at once, and recently enough to Jesus’s own crucifixion, and to the writing of the Gospels, that there would certainly have been living memories, and stories shared, about them.

And this was the point. They were meant to be a spectacle, with the condemned led through the busiest of streets, with the crucifixions themselves happening just outside the city gates where the last moments of agonizing death would have been easy to see, and difficult to avoid. Crucifixions were a death sentence for the condemned, and for everyone else—except the Romans themselves—it was psychological warfare. The brutality was meant to traumatize, and to keep the masses in their place.

This intentional trauma, and the intentional spectacle of the crucifixion comes to mind as we imagine the road that Jesus takes, carrying his cross through, and then outside Jerusalem—the road from the Praetorium to Golgotha—partly because we have to use our imagination for this particular portion of the Passion. Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us of Simon of Cyrene, who takes up Jesus’s cross for him; Luke tells the story of the Daughters of Jerusalem, wailing, and a rather composed Jesus giving a short sermon; Luke also mentions that the two who were crucified with Jesus, were led away with him. And John says the least: “So they took Jesus;  and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.”

It’s almost as if this part didn’t need much description, except for the details that would’ve made this journey unique. And it didn’t need much description because people already knew what it was like for someone to be led to Golgotha, having seen it, or having heard the hushed stories from other witnesses. Maybe this is a small remnant of the fact that this was so traumatizing, and such a shameful thing for the crucified and the companions of the crucified, that it was simply something  that you really didn’t want to talk about with others.

Certainly some would go out to jeer at the condemned person, but it’s also not hard to imagine, once word was out that a crucifixion was about to happen, that householders that had intended to go to the market that day, stayed home instead; it’s not hard to imagine that people took a different route home from work in order to avoid seeing such a traumatizing thing; Cicero gives the impression that a Roman citizen  might well feel like they could ask the colonial administration to make sure the route taken by the crucified didn’t pass by their home. I mean, think of the Roman children—they shouldn’t have to see that, should they? Crucifixions are meant for others, it’s the subjugated that should see that, after all; they are the ones that need to be frightened into obedience to the state.

It’s entirely possible, by the way, that I’m projecting some of our own sensibilities, our own gentrification, onto a time when it doesn’t belong. Jerusalem isn’t Kitchener; and the route of the crucified isn’t quite the one taken from House of Friendship to St. John’s Kitchen. But there are some similarities here, there is something here about seeing and hearing people who are suffering. The ways in which we often don’t want to see, and sometimes try to avoid the poor, and those in distress. And so we try to create a world in which we don’t have to bear witness to the fact of suffering.

As much as the route from the Praetorium to Golgotha doesn’t get much attention from our Gospel writers, the rest of the Passion sure does. For a man that lived into his early thirties, we hear relatively little about the rest of Jesus’s life; the gospels cover Jesus’s growing up, and to the small handful of years of ministry, but they aren’t dwelt upon. Not like they dwell on the final days of Jesus, reserving about a third of the Gospel story to the Passion.

It’s as though the Gospel writers wanted the Passion to be the centre of our meditation on Jesus; despite the shame felt by so many of the disciples early on, by the time the significance of the cross is understood we are encouraged not to look away, but rather to look directly upon the suffering Jesus; we are not to stop our ears, but to open them,

again and again, precisely to this part of the story of God in Christ. In this way, the Gospels are an intentional training of the mind, of our eyes, and of our ears upon a moment of suffering. It is a moment we are encouraged not to avoid, but rather we are encouraged, especially today, to stop; to see; to hear.

We do have one benefit over those first disciples, as we train our minds, our eyes, and ears on the cross. We know how it ends. And in knowing how it ends, we can see both what really is—that there is suffering, that there is pain, and that death is real—but also that this suffering, pain, and death aren’t the end.

I served a church in Belvedere, California, and it had this huge cross over the altar. We called it Superman Jesus because he was dressed in blue with a red cape—it was the victorious Jesus, with only small hints of suffering. And I understand the tradition of the empty cross—in saying that Jesus is not in perpetual suffering, but has in fact, he has been resurrected. That “He is not here.”

But I can’t help but think that such images don’t tell us enough. Because the resurrected Jesus, even the ascended Jesus, is never anything less than the crucified Jesus—and that this is in fact what we are training ourselves to see: the reality, not just of Jesus’s own suffering, but of human suffering, including the suffering of the marginalized, the poor, the ones in pain and close to death, and the political prisoners

suffering at the hands of capricious overlords.

And part of the training of our minds, eyes, and ears helps us to realize that two things are true at once: that suffering and death are real; and that suffering is not the end. That the capricious overlords do truly cause suffering, and attempt to bend others to their will through that suffering; but also that the capricious overlords do not get the last word. It is a way of thinking, and seeing, and hearing in faith—in the hope of things yet unseen, in confidence that even here, death does not win. That this is the true way of the world: not suffering without victory, or victory without suffering. But rather that two things are true at once, that there is such a thing as a suffering victory, and a victorious suffering.

And we can, with confidence now, not looking away from suffering, not taking a different route to the market, not staying home to avoid the pain of others—but that in seeing it, and hearing it, we can know that this road does not lead simply to death, but to hope. A hope wrought in the self-offering of the Son of God, and that in this act of self-giving, we see what God in Christ is willing to accomplish: a love poured out for us, for our sake, and the for the sake of a world in great pain.

The Revd Canon Preston DS Parsons, PhD