 GOOD FRIDAY 2000 C0LD ASHBY
At about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice saying “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me”?
Anyone who has been to the National Gallery to see the exhibition Seeing Salvation or who has watched the television programme of the same title will be aware – whether a Christian or not – that the crucifixion is, along with the birth of Christ, by far the most  potent theme of Western Art over the last 2000 years. 
Good Friday. I read, has always been the occasion for some serious self reflexion. When Boswell went to  went to see Dr Johnson  at breakfast on Good Friday 1773, he found him as he put it “in his usual manner upon that day, drinking tea without milk, and eating a cross bun to prevent faintness.”  Nowadays if we eat a cross bun it is in addition to our usual fare, and extra treat at tea time. 
But there is, however, a difficulty for us living in the 21st century, surrounded by the live images of death and destruction that reach us by television and photography from around the world. We have got accustomed to it. The crucifixion as a piece of plain barbarity, depicted in oils, can lose its impact among the many totally real and violent images in our lives. 
The answer to that danger of over familiarity is to bear in mind what the crucifixion means to each one of us individually.  Jesus laid down his life for you and me. And greater love has no man that that.  The death of Christ is so important because it illustrates the love of God. Jesus proved his love for us by going to the cross. Rather than choose his power to dominate and control,  He chose to submit to the worst that human beings could do to him.  “So the power of God is seen in the symbols of weakness –in a borrowed manager and on a wooden cross…Power is utterly controlled by love.  Jesus took the ugly things that sent him to his death: jealously greed, cruelty and fear, and made them into raw materials for the salvation of humanity”. One could say that he Christian family was born at the foot of the cross. 
 So as the Prayer Book says :
 “Above all things ye must give all humble and hearty thanks to God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost for the redemption of the world by the death and passion of our Saviour Jesus Christ , both God and Man, who did humble himself even to death upon the cross…that he might make us the children of God and exalt us to everlasting life”.
I confess I find it difficult to grasp the concept that Jesus was both God and Man in one.  One is tempted to ask why, if he were God, he allowed himself to go through the humiliation of his trial and the agonies of the crucifixion. That, of course, is a very human reaction to his passion. We know that, in the Garden of Gethsemane, as the Son of God, he did not want to go through what he had known all along was in store for him.  
“O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me : nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt”. 
There is an echo there of the temptation in the wilderness when the Devil suggested that angels would protect him from injury if only he would make use of them.
There, then, speaks too the fearful Son of Man. Yet it is not the death on the cross that Jesus feared in Gethsemane. He stated most emphatically that he came into the world to die that we might live.  I believe that He was fearful lest He could not get through the experience, as Son of Man.  
As Son of God, however, there was no problem – Satan could not touch him.  But if as the Son of Man he died only as an isolated figure, soon to be forgotten by mankind, that would mean that he would be no Saviour of Mankind. 
“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me” is the deepest cry of despair in the history of the human race. The cry of  Jesus, as  the Son of Man.  Although he had hoped that he cup would pass form him, he always accepted, even as a man,  that it was God’s will not His own that had to be done.   In Matthews and Mark’s Gospels  those are the last words that Christ is recorded as saying as the Son of Man, and the sentiment behind the words is of course very human. But the cup did not pass from him.  His triumph was to lie in the death, the supreme sacrifice for mankind,  that came soon afterwards. 
The Cross of Christ is, then, the symbol of the triumph of the Son of Man. It is the sign that our Lord triumphed to save the human race. Each one of us can get through to the presence of God now because of what Jesus – as the son of Man – went through at Calvary.
Within three hundred years or so of the events of the first Good Friday – an obscure execution in an obscure part of the Roman Empire-  Christianity had become the official religion of that Empire.  When you consider that there was no printing press, photocopying machine. telephone fax, radio, television or e-mail to broadcast the teachings of Christ and that they spread only through word of mouth or by the pen, or were carried by horse or on foot or by the puff of wind on sail, the spread of Christianity  is an extraordinary achievement.  
The message of  forgiveness and salvation delivered at Calvary has appealed to mankind ever since, inspiring works of art and architecture, music and  literature. Earlier this week in London I was lucky enough to be at Somerset House at the opening of the Gilbert Collection,  a gift to the Nation now permanently housed there and one of the largest collections of gold and silver artefacts ever assembled.  
One of the highlights is a magnificent pair of silver and silver guilt gates presented by Catherine the Great of Russia to a monastery in Kiev. They symbolised the entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven, separating the sanctuary from the nave in an Orthodox church. They are called “royal gates” because Christ the King of Heaven passes through them in the form of the eucharist. 
The workmanship is magnificent, a symbol of a craftsman’s devotion to the Christian ideal. And they brought to my mind the words of the psalmist:
 “Lift up your heads o ye gates,  and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors and the King of Glory shall come in”.  
“Who is the King of Glory?  The Lord of Hosts he is the King of Glory”. 
The message that I want to leave to-day is that  Jesus by his sacrifice for you and me on the cross gave us all access to the King of Glory.  But I think it right that, like Samuel Johnson over 200 years ago when nibbling his cross bun  we should think, too, about our sins and our inadequacies, about our death and redemption.  
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast Eternity…..”
We don’t have much very time in this world.  But for us Christians we have the hope that Eternity will be, thorough the sacrifice of Jesus on that first Good Friday , an Eternity with Him in the Presence of God – if we are worthy of it.  
21st April 2000
