Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Good Friday, 2007
Deacon Richard Buhrer

In nursing and in medicine (and probably in other professions as well) there is a practice called certification. When one is licensed to practice by the state, that is an endorsement of safety for consumers—the state board of nursing (or medicine) believes that you are not likely to accidentally hurt someone in the practice of your profession. Certification, however, is an endorsement of expertise: you can be expected to offer high quality service in some specialty. Doctors are often referred to as “board certified.” Expertise is what can be expected from them.

To become certified, one has to take a horrendous written exam and sometimes an even more horrendous oral exam as well. Every time I have left one of these tests (I’ve taken four or five in the course of my career), I say to my self: “Thank God that’s over. I’m glad I don’t have to do that again!”

On the other hand, when I fix an elaborate meal for people I love, I spend days planning the meal the meal in my mind, pondering it joyfully in anticipation; I plan a pallet of flavors and textures that will complement and fit well together. I also try to make it healthy and balanced, not a meal to encourage overeating but one that satisfies without overfilling. I consider the order in which I will prepare the foods so that everything is ready and at its best in the right sequence to make the meal a celebration of welcome and affection. That experience leaves me nearly as spent as taking a certification exam has. But when my guests are taking their leave and they tell me how much they enjoyed the meal, I say in all truth: “It was my pleasure; I enjoyed doing it for you.”

Dame Julian of Norwich prayed to God for “a recollection of Christ’s passion” as she put it. Then when she was in her thirties, she fell ill and was at the point of death when she had a series of visions (which she called Showings of Divine Love) and was miraculously healed. She then begain learning to read and write so that she could share these “Showings” with others. In the Twenty-Second Chapter of the Long Test of the Showings Julian writes this:

Then our good Lord put a question to me: Are you well satisfied that I suffered for you? I said: Yes, good Lord, all my thanks to you; yes, good Lord, blessed may you be. Then Jesus our good Lord said: “If you are satisfied, I am satisfied. It is a joy, a bliss, an endless delight to me that ever I suffered my passion for you; and if I could suffer more, I would suffer more…. How could it be that I should not do for love of you all that I was able? To do this does not grieve me, since I would for love of you die so often, paying no heed to my cruel pains….” The love which made him suffer (his passion) surpasses all his sufferings as much as heaven is above earth; for the suffering was a noble, precious and honorable deed, performed once in time by the operation of love. And love was without beginning; it is and shall be without end. And for this love he said very sweetly this: “If I could suffer more, I should suffer more….” This deed and this work for our salvation were as well devised as God could devise it. It was done as honorably as Christ could do it and here I saw complete joy in Christ, for his joy would not have been complete if the deed could have been done any better than it was.

Year in and year out at the end of the day on Good Friday, I have pictured the Lord Jesus saying (much as I said at the end of my certification exam): Thank God that’s over. I’m glad I don’t have to do that again!” But really, as Dame Julian teaches us, He feels more like I do after my special dinner: “It was my pleasure; I was glad to do it.”

When someone offers us a gift out of proportion to the relationship, as we perceive it, we get very uncomfortable. Like a woman whom a man has dated two or three times offering her an expensive diamond brooch, we feel suspicious of the other person’s intentions and fearful that we are going to be exploited. I think we are also often afraid that we will fall short of the other person’s evaluation of us: that we are not worthy, or rather, are not worth such generous love.

I personally find it very hard to just let someone love me, to accept his affection without doing anything in return, without, as it were, repaying the debt or earning the kindness. When I was a novice in the Jesuits, the novice master told us to listen God saying to each of us personally: “You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” I remember positively writhing with shame trying to listen to these words.

Sometimes (in part based on today’s reading from Hebrews) we conceive of Jesus sacrifice as coming between us and the wrath of the Father. Luther talked about this as the snow on the dung heap. The death of Jesus was the result of a collusion or collaboration of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to pour out such unspeakable, extravagant, unearned, and undeserved love on the human family, to bring us home, to set us free, to make us like God. And so we are deeply challenged by the enormity of God’s love for us. Our best response (and for me this takes considerable effort) is to accept this gift, to let this love into us, to allow this great gift to touch our almost obscene smallness.

At the end of her book, Dame Julian wrote: “And fifteen years after and more I was answered in spiritual understanding, saying thus, 'Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it to you? For Love. Hold yourself therein, and you shall understand and know more of the same…. Thus was I taught that Love was our Lord's meaning. And I saw with certainty in this, and in all, that before God made us he loved us, which love was never slaked nor never shall be. And in this love he has done all his work, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us. And in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had beginning. But the love wherein he made us, was in him without beginnings. In which love we have our beginning. And all this shall be we see in God without end. Which Jesus must grant us. Amen.