Good Friday Chief Service
18 April, Anno Domini 2025
St. John 18:1-19:42
To you who have gathered this day to stand at the foot of the cross of Jesus and behold your salvation,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
This is the day that the Lord has made. This day of darkness. This day of death. The is the Lord’s Day. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. This is the day that the Lord has long promised to the whole world, the day on which He would shatter the bows of our enemies and bring our warfare to an end forever. This is the day when God accomplishes His will for you – He saves you. This is the day that the Lord shatters the teeth of Satan. This is the day when God shows as complete foolishness whatever wisdom the world thought it had. This is the day that the sinless Son of God dies for wretched sinners like you and me so that wretched sinners like you and me might be spared the eternal torment and death which our disobedience and unfaithfulness have earned us.
The rubrics of these three days, the sacred Triduum, call for restrained joy. There most certainly should be joy this day. How could there not be? The terror of death is removed! Your death has been died by Jesus, once for all. We know that our Savior, risen from the dead, has been vindicated. Every word He preached, every claim He made, every prophecy He fulfilled – God has shown unequivocally to be true. There isn’t a single reason for you to doubt your salvation.
But there IS reason for restraint for a time. For today, Good Friday, we are brought face-to-face with just how bad our sins are, their true cost. Today we must not only hear about but look upon sin’s wages – the UNrestrained wrath of God against us that He directed at His beloved Son and the UN restrained love of God for sinners. We dare not pass by the cross without reflecting, without pausing to consider why. As we hear several times about the torture of our Lord, the abuse, the slander, the trumped up false charges, we don’t want to fall into the trap of feeling bad for Jesus. He didn’t. He went willingly, even joyfully, knowing what His death would accomplish for you. Instead, take these days to shed any delusions of goodness, to put away any notion that, apart from Christ, you are anything but a sinner. Look upon the spotless Lamb of God and cast aside whatever crowns and accolades the world has laid upon you as absolute rubbish. Your talents. Your achievements. Your hard work. Your sacrifices. Your deeds of kindness. Even on the flip side, the great depth of your sin, the deep wounds that have been inflicted upon you by others – these things aren’t your badges of honor or your pets to be nurtured. Count it all as loss, because it is. It is rubbish. It is nothing. Whatever comfort or glory you take in them is, by default, glory that belongs only to the Crucified One and comfort that you should only take in His work.
How quickly Satan uses those things in order to deceive and distract us, to create proud hearts that do not daily yearn for the mercy of God and life-giving Blood of Jesus. How unwillingly and unthinkingly do we pray? How begrudgingly do we pick up the precious Word of God and let it sound forth in our homes? How easily do we despise the opportunity to stand in the presence of God where all that Christ accomplished in these dark hours are poured out to us freely in Word and Sacrament? Here at the foot of the cross all is made clear, painfully and wonderfully clear.
Here are at the same time the moments of deepest sadness that our sin has demanded such a price and the most profound and inexpressible joy because that price has been paid. The Alleluias, silenced for a short time, will sound forth again. Truly, even this day has its Alleluia because we live now in the bright afterglow of Christ’s resurrection. We only pause here now so that the true glory and joy of Easter are always rightly understood.
Before there is life there must be death. Before light there must be darkness. Before there is an empty tomb there must be a full cross upon which hung the salvation of the world. Before your life must come your death. You must follow the path first trod by your Savior. There is no other road. You must die, you must be put to death. All your sins and evil desires must be drowned and die in the daily flood of Baptism. Your death and resurrection are not events. They are lifestyles. You must hear the demands of the Law of God and feel the piercing two-edged sword cut through to your soul and expose the evil that lies within and pours out of your hands and mouth. You must be brought to believe and confess that your sins are worthy of nothing less than damnation and that there is nothing you can or have done that could make sufficient satisfaction for your guilt.
But this death, the death that God works in you, brings life. Because in this death you die to sin, not to God. You begin this life that way. Dead in your sin and trespasses. You are conceived an enemy of God, a rebellious insurrectionist who is always rising up to assert his own will over that of God’s. And THAT is what must die. That is what God puts to death. He puts to death the prideful, selfish desires. He drowns your heard-heartedness. He kills the lustful, covetous thoughts that daily plague your heart and mind. And He does that to you by doing that in Jesus. All of that was nailed to the cross in the flesh of your Lord and Savior. He who knew no sin became sin, became your sin, for you. Jesus is the man, the sinner.
Having died in Jesus, you have been given the same indestructible life that burst forth from the tomb on Easter, the same life that reigns eternally at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. That is the Life that you consume, rather, that consumes you, in the Holy Supper of Christ’s Body and Blood. It doesn’t matter what disease is consuming your body. It doesn’t matter that you are still harassed and afflicted by temptation. It doesn’t matter that you barely make it through this life, through each day. The Son of God has died. Death is undone forever. Your sins are forgiven. Your enemies – earthly and spiritual – have no power or authority over you. You belong to the One who has already passed through death and as surely as they cannot harm Jesus, they cannot harm you who belong to Him.
This is the day that the Lord has made. This day that began in Upper Room, made its way to the high priest and Pilate, darkens on Golgotha, and finds its completion in the glorious light of the risen Jesus is THE Day that the Lord has made for you. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
In the Name of +Jesus.
