18 April 2025
Rev’d Richard Browning
Introduction
What brings you here? What are you searching for?
What do you need, even if you don’t know it? These are important.
The question I ask myself is what needs to die this Good Friday?
If the stories we tell ourselves hold up a pattern for our lives,
then today is not just about memory, but the imagination.
We may be recalling what happened, but it is also a telling of what happens.
In the presence of Perfect Love the human inclination
is to feel judged, not loved,
and our place in the story is with the mob shouting crucify.
So if not the Son of God, nor Perfect Love, what needs to die?
I’m going to say hope.
Hope needs to die. Today.
The story
Last Sunday I was one of the few Christians at the Palm Sunday Rally in the city. Who else walks around in public carrying a palm branch?
I was politely asked by a fellow rally person why I was carrying a palm branch.
I said because …
because Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey
and mocked the tradition of a ruler’s triumphal entry,
was greeted by a throng of people carrying palms
chanting “Hey’sanna, ho’sanna”
and was killed within the week
in an act of public torture sponsored by the state
under the approving eye of religious leaders;
Jesus’ resurrection three days later is how God does Justice
and by doing so,
the marginalised are centred,
the poor and the victim are bestowed with the kingdom of heaven
and the pattern of domination and exploitation is exposed and condemned.
She was satisfied. I could have continued.
There is a pattern to creation and in wisdom is everything made.
That pattern is woven into the fabric of the universe
and Wisdom is its name.
This pattern is costly Love,
this wisdom is the Eternal Christ,
always before history, beyond and within history.
And in one moment this pattern, this wisdom
erupted into history as Jesus,
Perfect Love, wholly human and divine,
born of a woman called Mary.
It is beyond comprehension that this son of man | Son of God
should not just die, but be killed
like a slave stripped of every shred of humanity.
At this point the question often asked might be “is this Jesus God?”
But the reverse is more helpful – Is God this Jesus?
How on earth can God be so human?
So tender? So playful, so vulnerable, so …
dead?
It is utterly contemptible,
certainly unpalatable,
wholly inconceivable.
If we live into the story of this day, and look squarely into the face of reality,
we must conclude that for at least one day in 365
we can let go, give up hope and surrender into despair.
God is Jesus, and Jesus is put to death. By humans.
Nothing escapes death, not even Jesus.
The work: Giving up on hope
Alexi Navalny, the most recent credible opposition to Vladimir Putin
died in a Siberian prison 14 months ago. Sudden death syndrome!
He returned to Russia knowing that he would be imprisoned.
He knew the criminal billionaire autocrat was incredibly resilient.
He knew wishful, hopeful thinking was worse than useless.
When the journalist Peter Greste plunged into the depths of imprisonment in Egypt, 2014, he says he had to let go of hope.
The habits of wishful thinking,
the grasping of outcomes as a function of positive thinking
was an experience of torture. So he killed this idea of hope.
Chelsea Watego, local Bundjalung woman says something similar
in her extraordinary book “Another day in the colony”.
She says “stuff hope” (actually she says “!*&% hope”). Her extreme frustration echoes what MLK said from a Birmingham Jail 60 years ago:
the greatest stumbling block is not the overt racist,
the KKK’er or segregationist,
but the white moderate,
the one who grasps at peace and order,
but not the peace that flows from Justice.
For a moment, look at reality and befriend it, and let go of hope.
Stuff is stuffed. To state the following brings no satisfaction (you will have your own list):
We are cooking. Not in a good way.
There is no magic technology or policy to save the reefs or the planet from continuing global temperature rises.
No one is coming to save the Palestinian from destruction.
If N is the amount the US spends on education,
twelve times N is how much it spends on its military;
International Law is arbitrary at best;
while journalism and propaganda is difficult to distinguish,
except when it’s the journalists who are ‘unalived’.
Last week Katy Perry sang way up in the air and after 10 minutes
came back and kissed the earth
so the extremely rich can dream of taking “civilisation” to Mars;
all the while the Amazon shrinks and burns
and people can’t afford houses or health care.
Children are treated like markets
and from the earliest of ages are trained to be consumers.
People die. Good people. Ordinary people.
All kinds of people, die. Often really young.
And the broken naked body of Jesus was hung in humiliation.
Stuff is stuffed.
Weep.
Ache.
Cry.
Add to the list your knowledge and experience of humiliation and pain.
In my experience I learnt that if you can still make plans
for what Sunday and resurrection might look like,
you haven’t died yet and Friday is still coming.
This is where the Good Friday sermon finishes.
Come, bring all the broken fragments of your lives,
the wounds that refuse to heal,
the hurts that overwhelm,
the shattered hopes and stolen joys.
Place them here (the cross).
God is Jesus and Jesus dies. Come.
Lostness is the final human truth. Accept it. (see Rowan Williams in Resurrection).
Then walk humbly into the despair of Holy Saturday:
God is dead, all is lost, emptiness reigns and the abyss swallows all.
And on a whim, as if by chance, return on Sunday,
Around dawn where with the rising of the light
a rumour will spread and catch fire:
the Pattern sewn into creation,
the Wisdom in which all things are woven,
the Eternal Christ that broke into history as a human
and was killed, dead and buried …
rises.
The renewed imagination
The imagination that springs out of that story is where authentic hope lies:
hope that is born,
not of our strength,
not of our will to power,
or our resilient positivity,
but of a reality
through despair,
grounded in the breath and Spirit of the Eternal Christ
risen among us.
What rises in us is not the hope of an outcome,
but a quiet confidence
that no death, no life, no ruler, no power or height or depth
can separate us from the presence of the Eternal Christ.
The Pattern, the Wisdom woven within creation, manifest in Jesus,
includes death,
and humanity is an attribute of the Divine.
Truth and goodness are in this Pattern, within the fabric of creation,
and this Pattern is the pattern for our days.
(By another name this is called the Way of the Cross.)
This is the ground of authentic hope,
from where comes the courage
to be wholly and tenderly human,
to care about the world,
to be faithful to the good and the true, no matter what;
offering fragments of tenderness that honours the dignity of others,
every other;
including tiny acts of hospitality to stranger and alien alike;
offering shelter to and receiving it from the filaments of nature;
practising simple acts of sovereignty
that refuse to be anything other than human,
resisting the manipulation of systems that dehumanise and commodify,
in the hope that the future where God is all in all,
has already begun!
But I am ahead of things.
I’m talking like it’s Sunday. Today is Friday.
In the midst of Friday you can’t see Sunday. But it’s coming.
A few references:
- Before Navalny died he said: “You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me it means we are incredibly strong. We don’t realise how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t do nothing.” Given the choices he has made, and the faith he draws on, his is a picture of authentic hope.
- On the short reference to Palestinians I feel a small caveat needs to be added: Palestinians don’t want an external force to save them. They just want to be able to exercise sovereignty over their own affairs. This is the whole point to their struggle. Amidst the abominable destruction where everything has been destroyed, the only thing that has not been severed is their deep connection to the land.
- The MLK quote comes from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963). This is the key quote: “I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…”
- “to be faithful to the good and the true, no matter what;”
This phrase is the difference between J.R.R. Tolkein and Frank Herbert, The Lord of the Rings and Dune. With Tolkein, there is a pattern to the universe, an overarching goodness to which we contribute our tiny small act of faithfulness, regardless of whether our efforts save the day. Those tiny efforts are necessary for the defeat of evil, but not the reason evil is defeated. Even Frodo was corruptible. In Dune there is no moral absolute, the hero rises by force of will, there is no moral arc to the universe permitting the likes of Leto II to say “I will bend the universe to my will” for the purposes of winning a good that is generated within, rather than existent without.
- The roots of this sermon have a strange origin. The inspiration was the third person in Jesus’ parable on the Ten Minas (Luke 19.11fl). The norms of ‘the kingdom of God’ are so easily distorted into the ways of the empires of the world, of Tiberius, Pilate and Herod that very few Christians would think to criticise the first two characters in Jesus’ story. Each was given one unit of money and told to “put it to work”. The slaves who turns one unit into ten and another into five were each rewarded. This is how we imagine the economics of society. So when one returns what he did not ask for, without even interest, he was humiliated. This is the way of things. Except.
Except the last line of the parable is shocking. What kind of context makes this palatable? I’m going to say there is none. The returning ruler, the one they all hated says:
But as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in my presence. (Luke 19.27)
Jesus does what he does so brilliantly. He sucks the hearer in, we find ourselves sympathising with a side only to discover the kingdom Jesus is about is different. We find ourselves most certainly aligned, but not with the kingdom of heaven. Remember, immediately after this parable, Jesus mocks the emperor’s triumphal march into Jerusalem by riding a donkey. The character in Jesus’ parable, though a slave, refuses to participate in the economics and patterns of this ruler who looks and sounds a lot like Herod. No wonder he was hated. Here we are on Good Friday with the one who would be the Messiah hanging dead from a tree. We are charged with the work of faithfulness. How do we kill our participation in the patterns, rules and ways of the empires and faithfully follow the Jesus’ Pattern? We must hand back the unit of money. But how then do we live? This sermon is a response to that question.
- Sarah Bachelard’s sermon on Hope, 15 Feb 2025 is brilliant. This is a shadow of hers. https://benedictus.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Hope-150225.pdf