Good Friday, Friday 18th April, by Fr Jack

Good Friday 1 of 3

The first of our women of the passion for today - St Mary Magdalene.

She is something of a mystery. Her name, Mary of the Tower (for that’s what Magdala means) makes her sound more like a City church than a first century Palestinian woman. There is a town called Magdala down the coast of the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum, but that’s not straightforward, I’m told, as a means of identifying her. And what about the very effective smear campaign against St Mary over the centuries, that she was a prostitute. So often in Christian history, men have required women to be either holy virgin nuns, or prostitutes; anything outside these two categories, too confusing, too much.

And then there’s the very direct confusion of which Mary are we talking about here? Is it Mary Magdalene that is afflicted by the evil spirits, a women of ill-repute? Is she the Mary who bathes Jesus’ feet with her hair? Or is that Mary of Bethany? Or are these both other Mary’s? There are no shortage of Mary’s keeping company with Jesus: His mother, her sister, the mother of James and John, the wife of Cleopas, the Magdalene, and others.

It may well be one of those questions that wasn’t a question at all to the Early Church who wrote and read the Gospels: they new these women, as we know our own aunts and uncles, even the ones we never met.

But you and I are left scratching our heads…

And in this, St Mary Magdalene herself points the way. 

Our faith is not a puzzle that needs solving, or binning if the puzzle is ‘broken’ because a solution is not forthcoming. We do not leave our brains at the door when we come to church, far from it. A spirit of intellectual adventure, of rigour, and enquiry are all essential aspects of our faith. Great Christian philosophers and scientists of many different disciplines show us this. 

But whilst not being a puzzle that needs solving, our faith is a mystery. And none more so than the Cross of Jesus we come to today. A mystery, as with all of our faith, that we do not get to lean over and interrogate from above, like a lab assistant poking a sample on the workbench, but one in which we live and move and have our being. This mystery is our lives, and the God with whom we are called into relationship. Real messy, lively, relationship.

And this is where St Mary Magdalene shows us the way. We don’t decode her, we don’t own her, or analyse her, we don’t label her and put her in a box, we join her… this woman of passion, at the feet of Jesus. 

We pour out the nard of our love, at his pierced feet today, we kiss them, and wipe them with our hair. Not because our love or faith or knowledge is sufficient. Not because we have all the answers, and everything neatly sorted out in our heads, but because He has loved us first and last, and will never let us go. 

Very shortly, you will be able to simply come forward and kiss the feet of Jesus. Egeria, who we heard about on Palm Sunday, describes doing this in Jerusalem with a piece of the True Cross, held by the deacons 17 centuries ago. Here today we have a simple wooden cross. You’re invited, when the time comes, to kneel or bow, to kiss, to caress. And a little while after that, you will be invited again to receive Jesus in Holy Communion. 

Such demonstrative and definite gestures, such intimacy, don’t always come easily to us. Perhaps we don’t have the passion of an ancient middle eastern woman of fire like St Mary Magdalene. Christina Rossetti will speak of this to us in the third hour, in her poem ‘Good Friday’. She speaks of being a stone, not a sheep, struggling to find the emotion, of struggling to feel a response. Not just think or know, but be in relationship with this man who hangs there for you and for me. Whatever you feel today, great or small, deep or shallow, let it be. And bring whatever you have, whatever is real in you  to Jesus on the Cross today. It is not right or wrong, proper or improper, just bring it.

Because whether you’re feeling like St Mary Magdalene, or you’re really not - it is not we and our feelings or knowledge who provide today. It’s not about us. St Mary Magdalene knows this well. It’s Him. It is not we who’s love saves the world today - it’s His.

Good Friday 2 of 3

The second of our women of the passion - Our Lady, Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

All through his Gospel, the evangelist, St John, calls himself the ‘Beloved Disciple’. ‘The Disciple Jesus loved’. St John is thought to have been a very young man when he knew Jesus, and he finally sets down his Gospel, the last to be written (in terms of chronology) after a long life of telling people about Jesus, of travelling the known world, or sharing the stories of Jesus’ ministry, and stewing on them, ruminating and reflecting, and then finally sculpting his masterpiece: this Gospel that bears his name. It was a largely aural culture of course, so actually writing a text wasn’t really a very important thing to do. But I’m very glad he did, for our sakes. 

And the point of all that, is that St John, in describing his own part in the Gospel, in calling himself the disciple whom Jesus loved, is not only describing himself, but you. St Luke has a similar trick. Very often St Luke hides the name of the person in a key moment, a defining interaction, because he wants us to see ourselves in that person’s skin as they speak with Jesus. Like one of those painted wooden boards at seaside towns, where you put your own face in the whole, and become part of the scene. So St John’s Beloved Disciple is always him, always you, and always the whole church community represented in that moment in the events of the Gospel. A personification of us all, if you like. At the Last Supper, last night, we, the beloved disciple rest our head on Jesus’ chest. We will run with St Peter to the tomb on Easter morning.

And here, as we heard a short while ago in the Passion narrative: we stand with the women at the foot of the cross: ‘Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.’ The sermons this week have been held together by a theme ‘women of passion: women of the Passion’. Well more than any others, here they are, quite literally. The women at the foot of the cross. 

I love our east window, but the stylised cross, and the very composed Mary and John either side don’t really encapsulate this moment. And we, the beloved disciple see it all as it is. The stinking rubbish heap, Golgotha. Who knows how many criminals have been crucified here before, and how much of them is left rotting, amongst scavenging animals and pests and flies. 

It isn’t the nails that most likely kill the crucified, but as His body crumples, unable to support its own weight, He suffocates, His lungs unable to fill. He probably loses control of His bladder and bowels too. And He probably didn’t have a tasteful white loin cloth. He was naked. Which makes it even more humiliating when, as I am told sometimes probably happened, the blood and body doing strange things, the crucified might well have got a random erection. 

It is not stylised. It is awful. It is sad and humiliating and inhuman. And the women, standing with us, manage somehow to remain. Well, not somehow. They are there because they love Him, and because He loves them. 

That is why we are here today. Because He loves us. Because we love Him. Our love for Him comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It is not always an easy love, not always constant, sometimes hard to put into words. Sometimes our love for God, is simply trying to love God, or wanting to love God. It’s messy and complicated. But then everything that is real in this life is messy and complicated. You cannot find a messier and more fraught reality than the awful one before us today. And our Jesus does not turn back from this confusing, humiliating mess. Nor will He from us and our mess.

I cannot imagine what is going through our minds on that hill outside the City walls on that day. What are they - the Marys and the others - thinking? What are they feeling? What are they saying? Where do we go from here? How long do we have to stay? And how could we leave?

And then Jesus speaks to us. To His beloved disciple, and through St John, to all Christians. Remember the Beloved Disciple represents us and all Christians when He appears in the Gospel. So Jesus speaks to us, to the whole church, as He speaks to St John. And from the Cross, He lovingly tells us what to do:

‘When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’

 27  Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.’

The Lord gives us to His mother Mary, and Mary to us. What does that mean for us? Well it means that every parent who has lost a child; every person who has cared for a love one, and perhaps watched them suffer, and even die; every person who has cried out to God with Mary’s Magnificat to bring down the mighty and lift up the lowly in places of exploitation and oppression; every scared teenager like Mary when Gabriel appeared to her and told her of her pregnancy; every person who feels loneliness like Mary must have felt loneliness at the foot of the cross…all those people and so many more, will never be alone. 

Mary is with them, because St John, we, take her home with us from the cross. Whenever you leave church today, do just this.

 Good Friday 3 of 3

We’ve just heard again the haunting and magnificent antiphon from the Anglican Benedictine Sisters at St Mary’s Abbey at West Malling in Kent. Cloistered away, day by day, they are the beating heart of the church and the whole human family. They pray with us and for us, hidden in the wounds of Christ on our behalf. And we out here, on theirs. Just as St Paul says, some are the hands, some the eyes, some the heart etc.

Ann Griffiths, a young unknown welsh girl wrote the most wonderful poetry. Bishop Rowan Williams has translated some of it, but says the English misses so much. But even so, the poem we have just heard: ‘Under the dark trees’ - under perhaps the dark shadow of the cross, Jesus waits. In His beauty and power, in His suffering and loneliness. And carries us ‘over the sea’, she writes. The Israelites escaped Egypt through the sea of reeds, we pass through death itself, into the promised land of His Kingdom, in the arms of Jesus, thanks to what He has done today. And all our ‘masks and fetishes’, Ann Griffiths tells us, fall away, and it is just Him, the real Him, and the real me. Just as St Paul writes to the Corinthians, when we shall see face to face, fully know, and be fully known, for the first time.

The sisters at West Malling spend the decades of their lives, waiting on God, waiting to ‘see Him standing’ there, as Ann Griffiths writes. The Sisters wait with a singleness of heart and a particularity of focus that their Religious Life makes possible. Some of us here may be called to such a life. But most of us are not called to the cloister. But all of us, in our own and different ways, all of us are called to know, to love, and to share Jesus. To know Him, but not just to know Him, but to love Him and rejoice in being loved by Him, but not just for me, I to love Him, but to share that love with all the world. 

The final women of the passion today, maybe are you and me, and the women and men of this parish - all who live, work, study or spend their time here - the beautiful children of God (each and every one of the them) for whom Jesus dies today, whether they know it or not.

As we heard nearly two hours ago now in the Letter to the Hebrews, ‘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 hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. 

Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.’

We are shortly to leave this place. Jesus is dead. There is nothing more to be done. 

But even then, while we wander off, wondering what to do with a day that is so strange and sad. And rightly so. Our Jesus our ‘friend’, as Ann Griffiths calls Him. ‘The friend of guilt and helplessness’, as we spend the rest of the day, He sinks below, into hell, and even there, even in the very depths, His life will overcome. Dark death, even now, is being destroyed, death’s chains and shackles are melting away, hell’s power, dissolved. And our Jesus cannot be stopped. It is only just beginning.

Poems

Good Friday
By Christina Rossetti

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

 
I saw him standing 
By Ann Griffiths (1776— 1805)

Translated by Bishop Rowan Williams

Under the dark trees, there he stands,
there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes?
I thought I knew a little
how he compels, beyond all things, but now
he stands there in the shadows. It will be
Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning,
when I shall wake to see him as he is.

He is called Rose of Sharon, for his skin
is clear; his skin is flushed with blood,
his body lovely and exact; how he compels
beyond ten thousand rivals. There he stands
my friend, the friend of guilt and helplessness,
To steer my hollow body over the sea.

The earth is full of masks and fetishes,
What is there here for me? Are these like him?
Keep company with him and you will know:
no kin, no likeness to those empty eyes.
He is a stranger to them all, great Jesus.
What is there here for me?
I know what I have longed for Him to hold me always.