Sermon for Good Friday, Year A (4-3-26)

There is a way of telling the story of the cross that makes it sound like a transaction—something tidy, and even something measurable. A debt is owed, a price must be paid, a balance must be settled, and Jesus becomes the one who steps in to pay what we could not. It's a way of thinking that feels familiar, because it mirrors the systems we live in: systems of economics, law, and trade - among others.

But when we listen more carefully to the witness of Scripture—when we linger with Isaiah’s suffering servant, and attend to the testimony of Hebrews — we are drawn into something far deeper and far more mysterious.

17th-century English Poet Richard Crashaw illuminates this mystery beautifully:

Lo, the full, final sacrifice

On which all figures fix’d their eyes,

The ransom’d Isaac, and his ram;

The Manna, and the Paschal lamb.

Jesu Master, just and true!

Our Food, and faithful Shepherd too!

Live ever Bread of loves, and be

My life, my soul, my surer self to me.

Help Lord, my Faith, my Hope increase;

And fill my portion in thy peace.

Give love for life; nor let my days

Grow, but in new powers to thy name and praise.

O soft self-wounding Pelican!

Whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man.

All this way bend thy benign flood

To a bleeding Heart that gasps for blood.

That blood, whose least drops sovereign be

To wash my worlds of sins from me.

Some of you will be familiar with the image of the self-wounding pelican — that in times of famine the seabird will prick its own breast, allowing its chicks to survive off of its own life-blood when no other option for life presents itself. And it's easy to understand why that image has had so much staying power over the centuries. Because we encounter there, as on the cross, is not a transaction, but a self-offering. Not Jesus paying something to God, but God, in Christ, giving God’s own self.

Isaiah’s vision is not concerned with settling accounts. Instead, it presents us with a figure who enters fully into the depths of human suffering: “despised and rejected,” “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” one who “has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.” This language isn't distant or abstract. It's intimate, almost unbearable in its closeness. The servant doesn't stand apart from human pain — analyzing it or resolving it from a safe distance. He carries it. He absorbs it. He allows it to mark him.

And this is where so many of our familiar explanations fall short —because they try, in one way or another, to shield God from the cost. They imagine a God who requires sacrifice but does not become it, who demands suffering but does not endure it, who remains untouched while another pays the price. But that is not the God Isaiah reveals, and it is not the God we meet in Jesus.

The letter to the Hebrews presses this point even further. We're told that we don't have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who has been tested in every way as we are. More than that, we're given this striking image of Christ offering “prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears.”

This isn't the language of transaction; it's the language of participation. It's the language of a God who does not remain distant from human suffering, but enters into it fully, and vulnerably, and without reserve.

When we begin to see this, the meaning of the cross shifts. It's no longer a kind of divine requirement imposed on Jesus from the outside — as though God needed to be persuaded or satisfied. Instead, it becomes the fullest expression of God’s own life—a life that is, at its very core, self-giving love. Of God’s desire to be with us, even at the cost of entering into our violence, our rejection, and even our death.

This is what Crashaw names so beautifully: “the full and final sacrifice.” Not one sacrifice among many, not one payment in a long chain of debts, but the complete self-offering of God.

In the cross, we see not simply what God does, but who God is. God is not a creditor waiting to be satisfied; God is love that pours itself out. God is mercy that does not turn away when it is rejected. God is a life so abundant that it would rather enter into death than abandon creation to it.

And if this is true, then salvation is not something external to us, as though it were a deal struck somewhere beyond our reach. Salvation is something we are invited to enter into. Hebrews tells us to approach the throne of grace with boldness, to receive mercy and find grace in time of need. That boldness doesn't come from confidence in ourselves, as though we had somehow met the necessary conditions. It comes from trusting that God has already given everything — that there is nothing left to withhold.

Yet this is precisely where the cross challenges us most deeply, because we are so accustomed to living by systems of exchange. We measure worth, we calculate value, we assume that love must be earned and that grace must somehow be balanced. Even in our understanding of God, we're tempted live as though divine love operates within the same limits.

But the cross breaks open those assumptions. It reveals a God who doesn't wait for worthiness, who doesn't hold back until the accounts are settled, who doesn't love us in proportion to what we can offer in return. Instead, it shows us a God who, in Christ, gives God’s very self into the hands of a broken world and refuses to take that gift back —even when it is met with rejection and violence.

This should stand as both our comfort and our calling. It's our comfort because it means there is nothing we can do to place ourselves beyond the reach of God’s love. There is no failure, no weakness, no sin that God has not already entered into and carried. But it is also our calling, because to follow Christ is to be drawn into that same pattern of life. We are invited to become people who no longer live by transaction, but by gift; people who do not measure others’ worth, but extend mercy; a people who, however imperfectly, learn to give themselves away in love.

Not because suffering is good, but because love — in a world like this — will always be costly.

And yet, this is the mystery at the heart of our faith: that the God who gives God’s self on the cross is the same God who raises the dead. What looks like loss is, in truth, the fullest revelation of divine life. “Lo, the full and final sacrifice”—not a payment made to satisfy God, but God, in Christ, holding nothing back, so that nothing—not even death itself—could ever separate us from the love that is, and always has been, the very heart of God.

Amen.