What can we say Good Friday?

   I’ll preach on Good Friday, although “preach” is too strong a word. “Homily” is even too grandiose. I’ll simply meditate, and briefly – or like a docent in a museum, with just a few words I point to the wonder, the horror, the beauty and majesty. In my new Lenten study (Unrevealed Until Its Season:), I cobbled together a meditation on “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” – which I’ll share with you in a couple of minutes. Don’t miss the splendid rendition of our choir singing Gilbert Martin’s arrangement – in St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh. Amazing. As I ponder and prepare, I’ll listen to that moving crucifixion moment in Jesus Christ Superstar, and I’ll look carefully to an image or two of the crucifixion. Grünewald? Rouault?

   At our church, we always read the Isaiah 52:13-53:12 early. Haunting. Good Friday isn't the time to explicate this complex text and its background. We trust the words to do their thing. And Psalm 22: Jesus' heart-wrenching cry, himself forsaken, and joining his God-forsakenness forever to ours. I try to ponder the horror, the sorrow Mary felt as she watched her son cry out these words she had taught him as a little boy.

   Then we do the Gospel reading in stages, gradually extinguishing lights and then candles until we are immersed in total darkness. On Good Friday, more than any other day, we are humbled by our inability to say anything – just as Jesus was all but silent as he hung for hours. On this day, more than any other, we realize we do not need to make the Bible relevant, or to illustrate it.  We can and must simply trust the reading to do the work it has done for 2000 years.

   Okay. Here’s my reflection on “When I Survey,” from Unrevealed Until Its Season: No hymn captures so thrillingly the paradox of horror and hope that is the crucifixion as Isaac Watts’s “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” We “survey” the cross. We don't just glance at it. We measure it carefully, size it up, consider every angle.

   Too often, we sanitize the cross, preferring those of smooth wood or some shiny metal. The original cross would have been of olive wood, gnarled, hacked hurriedly, with human flesh gruesomely nailed into it. Back in 1968, archaeologists discovered an ankle bone from the time of Jesus – pierced by an iron nail. Crucifixion was a gruesome, horrifyingly painful, public humiliation of criminals. Having seen plenty of crosses, the soldiers at the foot of Jesus’ cross didn’t “survey” this one. They didn’t know to be attentive to this one, or didn’t have the surveying skills to see that this was God, this was the start of a revolution of redemption. Looked like any other dying, despised person – which was precisely what God was hoping to achieve.

   “See from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down.” Just meditate on that for a minute, or an hour, or the rest of your life. Blood and perspiration were mingled all over his ravaged body, and then after the piercing by the soldier’s cruel lance, Rock of ages, cleft for us, blood and water flowed, mingled. But it wasn’t tragedy and justice mingled, although most observers then would have thought so. It was sorrow and love, God eternal, finally and fully manifested love for us, mingled with sorrow over our brokenness, our waywardness, our confusion, our mortality. Medieval paintings depicted little angels flying around the cross with cups to catch that sorrow and love flowing down. It’s precious. It’s medicine. It’s life for the world.

   Watts asks us, “Did ever thorns compose so rich a crown?” Museums all over Europe display sumptuous crowns. At Elizabeth II’s coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed St. Edward’s Crown on her head. It was heavy, forged of 22 karat gold, with 444 precious stones, aquamarines, topazes, rubies, amethysts, sapphires. She then knelt to receive the body and blood of our Lord. Did she ponder his crown, bristling thorns gashing forehead, temples, and scalp? Or the sacrificial love that refused the derision of spectators: “Save yourself” (Luke 23:37).

   This cross isn’t just some religious artifact, or even the mechanism God uses to get you into heaven once you’ve died. It fundamentally alters our values, and how we live. If this is God, if the heart of God was fully manifest in this moment, if this is what God’s love actually looks like, then everything changes. “My richest gain I count but loss” (echoing Paul’s words in Philippians 3:8). “Pour contempt on all my pride.” “Forbid it Lord that I should boast, save in the death of Christ” (echoing Paul’s other words in Galatians 6:14). “All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them.”

   Indeed, the more we ponder the crucified Lord on the cross, the less attached we are to the gadgets and baubles of this world, and the less arrogant we become. There is no other reason to “give up” anything for Lent, but to make us ready to abandon what we were clinging to, as we realize in the face of our mortality, and God’s redeeming love, these formerly valued things are just nothing. It is as if someone at the foot of the cross were reading the book of Ecclesiastes aloud: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Indeed.

   Casting aside vain fantasies, we don’t walk away from our survey back to our old life. Instead, we get caught up in Christ’s causes, and become generous with our money and things. What is your offering to God? Watts’s hymn imagines “Were the whole realm of nature mine” (an absurd idea, that the richest of the rich could have so much!) “that were an offering far too small.” No gift I could muster would be enough to begin to match Christ's sacrificial gift to me, to us - so when then is my giving so measured, so chintzy?

   We get busy and deluded and forget what the life of faith is about. We water it down to a little add-on, something we indulge in when convenient, a place we turn when we're in a pickle. But the last words of the hymn get to the truth of things - and stand as a stirring, unavoidable challenge to us, if we sing with any sincerity at all: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” Not this compartment of my soul, or this segment of my life, or the part of me I don't mind parting with. My soul. My life. My all.