The Third Reflection offered by the Rt. Rev. Kirk Stevan Smith, Bishop of Arizona, during the Third Hour of the Good Friday liturgy on 21 March 2008, at St. Philip’s In The Hills Parish, Tucson, Arizona

What would you think if you came into church today and instead of seeing a cross over the altar, you saw instead a life-size replica of an electric chair bolted to the wall? Or what would you think if instead of a cross hanging around their necks, the clergy and choir members had fashioned on the end of a chain a little hangman’s noose. What if the stained glass windows were filled not with scenes of the life Jesus, but instead contained images of guillotines and hypodermics full of sodium pentathol?

Its ironic, isn’t it, that the central symbol of our faith should be an instrument of execution, and yet we almost never associate it with something so horrible!

We now come to the third of Good Friday meditations. In the past two hours we have been using the magnificent wood carvings on the altar to focus our attention on the meaning of Jesus’ passion. I would remind you again, that these figures of Mary and Joseph are two of the greatest art treasures of this parish and were made in Lorraine for a convent of nuns there around 1480. They originally formed part of what in church architecture is called a rood screen—rood means cross in Anglo Saxon. These rood screens were a fixture of medieval churches until the time of the Reformation and they always portrayed three figures, Mary, St. John, and in the center, Jesus on the cross.

As we have seen in the previous two meditations, this image is taken directly from the Gospel of St. John and is the subject matter not only for rood screen carvings but for countless works of Christian art (such as your bulletin). I have suggested earlier that the figure of Mary reminds us of the humanity of Jesus and his willingness to endure all aspects of human suffering. The carving of John—the beloved disciple takes that idea further and reminds us that as his disciples, we too are to share in the suffering of the world by intentionally being present wherever we find pain in our world.

Now we come to the cross itself, that instrument of shameful death. In its unadorned state, the cross is something we can barely look at—God with his head in the hangman’s noose, the ultimate blasphemy.

Those of you who are long time members of St. Philips will remember that it is the custom here to veil the cross during Lent, and to drape it in black on Good Friday. That is a powerful symbolic gesture and can mean many things. In one sense it makes us realize that the ugliness of the cross is so great that we can’t fully bear to look at it and must keep it hidden, in the same way it is taboo to show pictures of dead bodies on television or why we quickly cover them with a cloth at the scene of an accident.

The very early church felt this way too. The very earliest images of Jesus in Christian art portray him as the Good Shepherd—a young man carrying a sheep over his shoulders. When around the year 1000 he was portrayed on or near a cross, it was as King Jesus, Christus Rex, the victorious and risen Christ ruling from the cross in majesty. It wasn’t until about a thousand years ago that we first begin to see a suffering Christ, with wounds and blood and all the other marks of torture and agonizing death. In the Spanish and Mexican tradition some of these crucifixes became quite gory indeed.

I have asked that the cross be uncovered today. It is not the original carving that went with the figures of Mary and St. John, still it is a crucifix. In the medieval church it would have been nearly life-size. Here, as in most churches, it has shrunk in size and has been prettied up with precious metals and jewels to make it more acceptable. What was an ugly instrument of criminal execution has become a piece of jewelry. The figure of Christ has been either removed or played down. As I once overhead one Sunday school teacher explain to her class, “Only Roman Catholics have crucifixes, that’s because they think about death all the time. Our crosses don’t have Jesus; we don’t like to look at him hurting.”

But hurt he did, and in the most horrible way imaginable. That is inconceivable enough, but what is even harder for us to grasp is why he had to suffer so. The stock answer is that he died for our sins, a theological statement we throw around with great abandon, but probably not giving it the attention it deserves. We call this the doctrine of the atonement, and it is a topic that will be preached about nearly every Sunday if you go to a Baptist church, but will probably hardly ever be mentioned if you go to an Episcopal Church.

But if we don’t tackle it, we are going to be hard pressed to come up with a good answer when our children or grandchildren ask us the question—What is Good about Good Friday?

I can’t do the topic of the atonement justice in a few short paragraphs, but I do want to point out that there are at least three different understandings of why Jesus had to die on the cross, all of which have good biblical support and all of which have had their theological champions throughout the ages.

The one we hear the most about has been called the theory of penal substitution. It is the preferred teaching of most conservative Christian groups and televangelists. It goes something like this: Since God is a just God, there had to be a price paid for the sinfulness of human kind. Since we were unable to pay the penalty for sin, Jesus volunteered to take the rap for us, and to substitute his own life for ours. I must admit I have a lot of trouble of with this approach. When my good friend in England, the Dean of St. Albans, Jeffrey John went on BBC radio last year, he stated that the picture of God one gets from such a substitution theory makes God out to be some kind of psychopath who would kill his own son rather than admit that his rules were wrong—such a blood-thirsty tyrant would hardly be worth worshiping.

There is another ancient approach, sometimes called the Christus Victor theory in which Satan can only be overcome by Jesus willingness to absorb his weapons and suffering death and thus conquer them. A good example of this occurs in the movie Ghandi, which contained a powerful scene in which Indian nationalists were instructed not to fight against the British occupying soldiers, but to defy them non-violently. One after one, countless Indians would step up to the British police who would club them into unconsciousness, and yet they kept coming row after row. Never lifting a finger, never striking back. After a while, the British troops simply threw down their clubs in disgust and walked away. The power of evil was absorbed by the sacrifice of those non- violent protesters.

Lastly, a metaphor more to my liking is that of the moral model or healing example. Christ, through giving his life for us demonstrates the extent of God’s love for us, even though we hardly deserve such a sacrifice. Paul makes this point in his letter to the Romans:

7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Of course, any time we try to make sense of God all our efforts are going to fall short. I suspect that all three theories contain an element of truth and each has advantages and disadvantages, but that is a topic for another sermon.

So instead of talking about theories, let me end with my third and final story, one which for me sums up the meaning of the cross, and answers the question, why did Jesus have to die? The answer, as this story shows, is that reconciliation, whether it is between families, communities, or between us and God, can only come with vulnerability and risk.

On display at the St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland is an ancient door with a rough, hewn, rectangular opening hacked in the center. Here's why:

In 1492 two Irish families (the Ormonds and Kildares) were involved in a bitter feud. Besieged by Gerald Fitzgerald (the Earl of Kildare), Sir James Butler (the Earl Ormond) and his followers took refuge in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

The siege wore on for several weeks and Gerald Fitzgerald concluded that the feud was foolish. The two families worshipped the same God, lived in the same community and attended the same church and yet they were engaged in a life or death battle. Fitzgerald went to the chapel door where the Ormands were holed up. He called Sir James and promised on his honor that no harm would come to him.

Sir James feared treachery and refused to respond. Fitzgerald grabbed a sword and hacked a hole in the door. Then he thrust his arm through it. And waited. In a moment his arm was grasped by Sir James and the feud ended. It was from this gesture that the Irish get the expression "Chancing one's arm."

Christ did not just risk his arm for us, but gave his very life—and that makes all the difference. My friend Jeffrey John summed it all up in his radio talk with a story of his own:

The most powerful illustration of the meaning of Christ’s suffering I know comes not from a Christian writer but a Jew, Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor and Nobel prize winner, who described his experience of Auschwitz in a famous book called Night. In the face of so much horror and evil many lost their faith; yet for a few it became, paradoxically, a new realization of God's closeness to them. In one harrowing passage Wiesel tells how a young boy was punished by the guards for stealing food. He was hanged on piano wire, while all the other prisoners were forced to watch.

For more than half an hour the boy stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony before our eyes. We were all forced to pass in front of him, but not allowed to look down or avert our eyes, on pain of being hanged ourselves. When I passed in front of him, the child's tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed. Behind me a man muttered, 'Where is your God now'? And I heard a voice within me answer him, 'Where is he? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows.

For me - if not for Ellie Wiesel - this above all is the meaning of the Cross: that God is one with us in our sufferings, and not just 2000 years ago but through all time.

On the cross God absorbs into himself our fallen-ness and its consequences and offers us a new relationship. God shows he knows what it's like to be the loser; God hurts and weeps and bleeds and dies. It's a mystery we can hardly glimpse, let alone grasp; and if there is an answer to the problem of suffering, perhaps it's one for the heart, not the reason. Because the answer God has given is simply himself; to show that, so far from inflicting suffering as a punishment, he bears our griefs and shares our sorrow. From Good Friday on, God is no longer "God up there," inscrutably allotting rewards and retributions. On the Cross, even more than in the crib, he is Immanuel, God down here, God with us.

And so we prepare to leave the rood screen this day, as we turn away from Mary, and John, and Jesus and the cross and move back into the world.

We are left with many questions, and that is as it should be, for suffering, and Jesus’ suffering will always remain a mystery, but perhaps one question is more important than all the rest, and in one way or another we will all have to answer it:

Out of the death I have witnessed today—can new life come?