Sermon on Good Friday - Fr Sam Rossiter-Peters

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Please be seated. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? These words echo through Good Friday. They're raw, violent, terrible.

They're the silence which follows a question everyone was too afraid to ask. The heartbreak of a child crying in fear and pain. The wailing of a bereaved parent.

We know that these are the words of Psalm 22, the first words. Words which give way to a song of praise. From you comes my praise in the great congregation.

I shall live for him. Future generations will be told about the Lord and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn. Saying that he has done it.

Perhaps then these words of Jesus were the opening phrases of a cry of victory. Cut short by his broken body. But maybe they weren't.

Maybe after being betrayed by a friend. Abandoned by everyone he loved. Humiliated.

Lied about. Beaten. Whipped bloody.

Made to march through the streets with a cross on his back. Stripped naked. Pierced by nails.

And finally being left to lift himself on those wounds or else suffocate. Jesus' strength failed. And if it did, who could blame him? Maybe as he faced his imminent death, Jesus felt afraid.

Philippians 2 verse 7 tells us that though the Son of God, Jesus emptied himself of divine knowledge and power to become human. This emptying, called kenosis, tells us that Jesus wasn't on that cross with the assurance of divine knowledge. He was there in the form of a slave.

Philippians 2:7

A fully human 33 year old. From a little countryside town, dying alone in the city. I wonder if at that moment, the very human Jesus had a flash of panic.

What if he'd gotten it wrong? What if he was just a man like they said? What if this really was it? Even if he'd had divine knowledge, it wouldn't necessarily have helped. He was, of course, the Son of God. But the Son of God had never died before.

What would that even mean? The one who created and sustains the universe, murdered by the ones who he created and sustained. It was an idea which would become a stumbling block to the Jews and sheer stupidity to the Gentile philosophers. To face the unknown and to feel fear is human.

The unknown is terrifying because we can't control it. We can't even prepare for it. We don't know what tools we might need, what defences to construct.