The Rev’d Ivica Gregurec
Good Friday
Readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16,5:7-9;
John 18:1-19:42
Dear people of God,
There is a question that has haunted every generation of Christians who have stood, as we stand now, at the foot of the cross: Why did Jesus die? Not in the mechanical sense, because we know the soldiers, the nails, the authorities, the abandonment. But why, in the deeper sense?
What is God doing here, in this darkness?
The most familiar answer speaks of payment and punishment: Jesus dying in our place, absorbing wrath, settling a debt we could never pay. That tradition has brought real comfort to many. But it is not the only way the cross has been understood.
Recently, I visited a family that has started to attend All Saints’ on the Sunday, which was my first Sunday here as a Vicar. We discussed some theology when I visited them and I got reminded of this topic. So, it is kind of, John’s fault, that my reflection today went in this direction.
A thinker named René Girard (1923, France – 2015, USA) spent his life studying why human communities so often find their unity by turning on someone. When tensions rise and conflict threatens to tear a group apart, there is a terrible recurring solution: find someone to blame, choose a victim and drive them out. In the wake of that violence, there is a feel of an almost miraculous calm, that gets dressed, over time, in the language of religion and sacrifice.
Girard called it the scapegoat mechanism. When he read the Bible, something drew his attention him: Scripture, again and again, refuses to go along with it. The Bible keeps taking the side of the victim and nowhere more so than in the story we tell today.
‘He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering… yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities’ (53:3,5).
Listen to how Isaiah traces the crowd’s logic. First, the assumption that this man’s suffering proves his guilt. He was nothing, a nobody and his pain confirmed what we already believed, that God had abandoned him. It is a logic we still recognise. When someone falls, there is a quiet voice in us that reaches for an explanation: they must have done something wrong and we are not like them.
Then the poem turns: the servant is innocent. He bore our griefs, not his own. The crowd was wrong and the verdict was unjust. Isaiah names that injustice plainly – centuries before Calvary.
From the cross, Jesus cries the opening words of Psalm 22: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He is not simply voicing private anguish. He is placing himself inside the longest cry in human history, the cry of every person ever blamed for their own suffering, ever told that God had abandoned them. He stands with all of them and in standing there, he begins to tell a different story.
‘We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses… In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears’ (Heb 4:15;5:7).
In the ancient world, the priest and the victim were carefully kept apart. The priest stood before God on behalf of the people and the victim was the one consumed. The whole system depended on that distance: on offering something, someone, in your place, and walking away.
Letter to the Hebrews collapses that distance entirely. In Jesus, the one who makes the offering and the one who is offered are the same person. This priest is not distant or unaffected as he prays with loud cries and tears. The victim’s humanity is not obscured, but glorified. The one we handed over, turns out to have been God all along, who is not watching from above, but is present in the suffering, from the inside.
St Melito, bishop of Sardis, near Smyrna (c. 100 – c. 180, modern Turkey), saw this with startling clarity. His ‘On the Passover’ is one of the earliest and most dramatic Christian homilies on the crucifixion. It fits this reading beautifully, because he insists on naming the full scandal: the victim is God. He refuses to let the cross be domesticated:
‘He that hung up the earth is himself hung up. He that fixed the heavens is himself fixed. He that fastened all things is himself fastened to the wood. The Master has been insulted. God has been murdered. The King of Israel has been slain by an Israelite hand’.
It is deliberately a shocking passage. Melito wants us to feel the full weight of what has happened: not a distant transaction, but God walking into the place of the victim. When we are invited to approach the throne of grace with boldness, it is because the one on that throne has been where we are. The One there understands: not from theology, but from experience.
Pilate said to the people, ‘Here is your King!’ They cried out, ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!’
John tells the Passion with slow-motion clarity, because he wants us to watch, not just what happens to Jesus, but what it reveals about everyone around him. Nobody in this story really wants to kill Jesus for any coherent reasons. Pilate finds no case against him and says so three times. The crowds shift and surge. Yet the momentum builds, each person passing the decision to the next, everyone swept along, until an innocent man is dead and every hand is washed.
This is how this kind of violence always works. It doesn’t announce itself as murder. It arrives as necessity: someone had to be blamed, someone had to pay. And in his death, for a moment, the crowd achieves the unity it was looking for.
John calls the crucifixion a lifting up: the same word he uses for glorification. The cross is not the defeat of God’s love. It is its fullest expression. Above Jesus, Pilate fixes a sign in three languages: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. He means it as mockery, and the priests cannot get him to change it. What is written is written: the one they crucified is the King.
Good Friday holds up a mirror. Every community builds some of its peace on someone else’s pain. Every society, including the Church, has people whose suffering is made invisible, whose exclusion is treated as normal. We do it in politics, in families, in churches. We find our unity, too often, by agreeing on who does not belong.
The cross says: the one you sacrifice is always someone’s beloved, who is made in the image of God. The God revealed in Jesus is not the God who blesses our scapegoating; it is the God who enters it as the victim and refuses to stay dead.
We come today to venerate the cross. We come to confess that we know the crowd’s logic from the inside. And we come in hope, because the silence of God this afternoon is not the silence of absence. It is the silence before God’s most astonishing answer.
‘He was despised and rejected… yet it was our infirmities he bore, our diseases he carried… and through his wounds we are healed’.
May we leave this place a little less willing to be part of any crowd that circles someone and a little more willing to stand with whoever is at the centre of it.
On Good Friday, we are invited into a great silence of the tomb, before resurrection, the silence in which we must reckon with what this day has meant and what it must mean. What it must not mean is a God of violence and wrath who demands blood before offering love.
What it can mean and what I believe it does mean, is a God who enters fully into the suffering of the world, who refuses to remain at a safe distance from death and injustice, who does not explain pain from the outside but bears it from the inside. A God who, in the words of Jürgen Moltmann (1926 – 2024, Germany) (whom I already mentioned on Palm Sunday), is the crucified God – not presiding over the cross from on high, but nailed to it.
That God does not need our violence; that God does not sanction contempt for any people; that God stands not with empires and those who execute, but with the condemned, the marginalized, the ones the powerful wish to silence.
May we, this Good Friday, stand there with him.
Amen.