Preached on Good Friday, April 18, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.
It is important that we speak plainly and honestly today. We owe that much to ourselves, and to him. There is no hiding, here. No pretty turns of phrase to evade the truth.
No, the truth of Good Friday is simply this: We failed, God.
We failed today, fully and completely. We failed to see you. We failed to understand who you are and why you created us and why you came among us and what you asked of us.
It was so simple, what you asked, but so impossible for us to accept: to love one another and to love you.
But for so many reasons, and sometimes for no reason at all, we can’t do it. We don’t do it. And instead we crucify. And instead we are crucified. We fail.
And oh, how we hate to admit it. We are so afraid of failure and shame. But somehow that fear of our own failure, that recoiling at our own limitations, is precisely what we lay upon others. We make them bleed the blood we are terrified of spilling. We make them die the death we are terrified of dying.
And so we have ended up here again, like clockwork, on another Golgotha, on that dusty hill which arises in every age, soaked with sorrow and strewn with cynicism. And we are bathed, today, in a grim, unflattering light, the sort of light that doesn’t illuminate so much as it lays bare. In the deathly light of Good Friday, every blemish and crack and wound in the body of creation is made plain in your body, Lord; your precious body, as it, too, fails.
And we see here, in Jesus, upon this hill of sorrows, that, despite all our best efforts and biggest dreams, we don’t know how avoid failure in the end, not in the world as it is, because here death consumes even our greatest successes and highest ideals. It even consumes our God.
So even if we give everything we have, like Jesus did, even if we practice peace and stay patient and never speak a hateful word, even if we do everything asked of us, still, it seems, the crucifier comes. The crucifier who is time and death and fear and fury.
Still he comes, with crosses freshly assembled to dole out. Still he comes, in his heavy boots, stomping on the harvest of our years.
And still he comes, too, this crucifier, as a strange unwelcome traveler within us, welling up as the apathy and anger and resentment of our own hearts. We are the crucifier, too, somedays, even if we wish we weren’t. We must say that plainly, too.
Because so often, on any given Friday, good or otherwise, we choose to shrug or gawk or look away as the crucified ones continue to struggle through the streets of our own Jerusalems: draped in the flags of other nations or other identities, crowned with the thorns of prejudice, bearers of the burdens we’ve been taught to sneer at or dismiss.
And if we are honest, really honest with ourselves, we’re often just relieved that it isn’t us.
And so on it goes, this passion play.
So yes, we have failed, God, and we can’t fully explain it.
But it is necessary to say it, now, because really, what else can be said at the foot of your cross? There is no worldly victory here. No positive spin. There is no sly wink or nudge you give us that this is all just for show. This is simply what it appears to be. It is the opposite of love. And you, the One who is Love, you are gone.
And that is that.
But here’s the thing about today, God (and I am afraid, almost, to say it out loud, but I must, if we are speaking plainly.) Today is your encounter with failure, too, Lord. Your acceptance of your own failure.
I’ve struggled to understand this or even put it into words, since you are eternal and unfailingly good, but I am realizing that Good Friday is nonetheless your own surrender to failure.
Because you chose not just any death, but a shameful, embarrassing, degrading death. On the Cross, we see the fullness of your failure on the world’s terms. We see how creation could not bear the weight of you, how even your blessed flesh could not bear the weight of us. How you could not draw us back from our worst impulses.
You who–ever since your hungry children stumbled out of Eden with tearful eyes–you who have been trying to teach us how to undo the curse, how to find our way home. You who have parted seas and toppled tyrants and rained bread from heaven and crossed deserts and appeared in smoke and fire, all in the hopes of helping us find you again and find ourselves again…today is the shocking day when you say, my children, I have failed, too.
Because you have come to us in every way possible. You have come as light and as fire and as word and now as a man. You have come as bread and as silence and as liberation, to show us, to show us, to show us, and still, still, still we are here again, on this dusty hill, unable to truly find each other.
No matter what you have done til now, still, the crucifer comes.
And I am sorry, Jesus seems to say with his own parched lips, out of his own deep wounds. I am sorry that this has never quite worked. I am sorry that we always seem to end up here, on these many Golgothas. Because I promise you, you were created for so much more than a world full of crosses. I have wanted to give you so much more than this.
But now, it is finished. It is finished.
On Good Friday, the saga of our long journey out of Eden is finished. It ends here, with us casting God from our garden, sending him away, weeping and hungry. It ends here.
And I realize that saying this might make us uncomfortable. Surely this is not the end of the story? We know there is more.
But it is very important, actually, that we let Good Friday be Good Friday, and nothing else. That we let it be the ending that it is.
It is necessary, I think, after our long history of death and despair, to say that this particular story, this particular mode of endless disappointment—ours and Gods—ends today.
Because perhaps we need to say goodbye here, us and God, here upon the dusty hill, upon the rubble of our failed dreams. Perhaps Jesus’ words are the most honest thing that we can say to one another today: it is finished. We tried, and it failed, but whatever this is, this world that crucifies truth, it must be finished.
Because somewhere, out beyond time and terror and the Cross, somewhere within the mysterious alchemy of love and death and failure, only there and only then is something else possible, some truly good news that is not just a new chapter in this same, sad old story, but that’s a new story altogether. A new creation altogether.
A different garden that is neither Eden nor our own, but a new world, a new life in which no one will ever be cast out.
But whatever that looks like, whatever that new thing is that might yet be revealed from the depths of the tomb, we have to come here, first. We have to look into the face of our broken Lord, who tried so hard, who came so far, who loved so deeply. And we have to let him look at us, too: we who try so hard, who have come so far, who love so deeply, and yet are as broken as we’ve always been.
And today, for now, we have to let each other go.
I am sorry, Lord. I am sorry for all that we could not be to each other in the world as it is. I am sorry this is the ending of your time with us.
But please, please let it not be the end.
Let there be some new word spoken, some gentler, more kindly light revealed. Let there be something on the other side of all this failure. Let there be something plain and honest and good that does not always get crucified.
For whatever it is, we wait.
For you, we wait.
By Another Road 