The Undoing of Death - Good Friday 2018

What do you think you're worth? Have you thought about it? What do you think you're worth? We say that human life is priceless, but not true. Human life is not priceless because our Creator has set a price. What you are worth, according to our Creator, is His very own life.

This is the meaning of redemption. It tells us in our slavery to sin and death, our Creator, Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made, became one of us. Yet, more than us, God in flesh, fully divine, fully human, to purchase us, to buy us back out of real bondage, cosmic bondage, sin and death.

To buy us back with His very own blood. So we've been bought with a price. That's how much we're worth.

And tonight, this is what the Church proclaims. His aim being to bring many sons and daughters to glory. That is, into the Father's house in perfect, eternal communion with God, the Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Where do you come from, Pilate asks. Jesus answered those questions last night in chapter 13. But before Pilate, he gives no answer.

He fills us in well on his own self-consciousness, his mission, his former address. He came down from heaven, affectionately addressed as the Father's house. He came down from the Father's house and was made a human being.

And in so doing, death became the defining goal of his life. That's the paradox. The Lord of all life came to die for a purpose, of course.

This is divine logic. It's the divine logic of Jesus' life. In his words, it was for this reason that I have come to this hour.

His dying took three hours from noon to three o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday, just outside Jerusalem. And as Jesus was dying, he prayed. He prayed seven one-sentence prayers.

These are found by piecing together the crucifixion account in the four Gospels. Jesus gives those last two tonight. I thirst.

And it is finished. The church prays these words such as tonight's Psalm 22. To step more deeply into the Paschal mystery.

We long for our deaths to be congruent with his, congruent with his self-giving life. Jesus' death is real. His heart stopped.

His brain ceased. His bodily temperature dropped. And as his vital signs ceased, ours were revived.

Salvation was accomplished. It was the death of death within the cosmos. His offering was the cure of the death dealing sins of the world.

The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world has given his life just prior to these last three dying words. It is finished. The mystery of Christ, the undoing of death by death is the final crushing of the serpent's head.

We remember Genesis 315 as the Lord said to the serpent. He was also addressing the woman. I will put enmity between you, meaning Satan, the serpent and the woman.

Ultimately, the Virgin Mary. And between your offspring and her offspring, Jesus Christ, he shall bruise your head. That's how you kill a snake.

Step on his head. And you, Satan, shall bruise his heel, making him immobile for three days. Satan bruises his heel, thus pulling the trigger of our salvation from the tyranny of sin's payoff.

Mortality, mortality infused into every living thing is now being renewed. Ransom, healed, restored, forgiven, as we sing. This mystery informs the way we live and love, forgive and are forgiven, the way we live and the way we die on the physical and historical level.

The death of Jesus on the cross can be accounted for, but for the salvation Jesus accomplished on the cross, it cannot. It's not so easy. And it is the words, it is finished, not a coroner's autopsy of the death that brings us back to the cross over and over again.

But revisiting Jesus' death is not the same thing as visiting the graveside of a friend. We come not to the cross tonight to merely remember. We are here to probe the meaning of our daily dying in the company of Jesus dying for us.

We are here to probe the meaning of our daily dying in the company of Jesus dying for us. What do I mean? Saint Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ, giving him a complete identification with the death of Jesus. He also says, I die daily, which speaks of the sacrificial offering of his life that he makes every day as he follows the way of the cross.

He says that you have died and your life is hidden in Christ and God to the Colossians. We participate in the mystery of the great mystery of Jesus' death. When he tells the Philippians that Jesus became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, he directs his readers, let this mind be in you, which was in Christ Jesus.

So this is just a glimpse of why we're here at the foot of the cross tonight. May God bless you.