"Good Friday "

by Revd Bruce Waldron - 21st March 2008

The cross confronts the way we deal with evil.

Do we become a part of it. Or is there another possibility. Victory and loss depend so much upon the indicators we choose.

In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, someone commented that the good guys finally won the war because they became better at being bad than the bad guys.

The cross is a challenge. Can we find another way of confronting evil in which we find the power to "will and choose" not to be drawn into what is confronting us.

Is power about overcoming evil in the sense of dominating over those we see as evil, or overcoming evil in the sense of choosing not to have our souls dominated by it, that can't be shaken even in the face of the cross.

Paul asked the question "Death where is thy sting, grave where is thy victory?" We usually interpret his words in terms of resurrection. But there is another aspect to this. Not even the final resort of evil, not even death, can deter the goodness and love of the One we follow, Whose Spirit is in us, Whose name we carry.

The cross confronts our courage, our trust in God, our own willingness to stand by a whole set of faith inspired understandings that as St Paul says, to some is nonsense, to others an offence, but to us who believe, it is the power of God to salvation.

It isn't a symbol of defeat and sorrow, although sorrow is there. It is rather, a symbol of resolute, undeterred, Holy Spirit empowered commitment to something that cannot be taken away by any means.

The Cross is a symbol of trust in God that elevates our vision to a dimension that transcends our contemporary indicators of success, a scale of indicators that is not defined and limited by temporal perimeters.

"Death where is thy sting? Grave where is thy victory?" Paul asks. The sting of death is sin. And Christ on the Cross symbolizes and carries the utter powerlessness of death to dominate what is inviolate in him, and in us.

When Jesus indicates again and again in the gospel story, that His glory is the cross, he invites us to see Good Friday as "good", the ultimate triumph of good over evil, not the other way around.