We will begin by listening to the chimes play this song:

“Come ye faithful raise the song of triumphant gladness!

Jesus enters as a king, joy transforms our sadness!

Raise your palms and cry aloud shouts of jubilation,

It’s the day the Lord has made, join the celebration!”

Join me in the glad call to worship printed in your bulletin.

We start out this service with palm branches and Hallelujahs. We celebrate the coming of Christ with joy. But the story doesn’t end there. We have to go through Holy Week to get to the other side.

When it comes down to it, we have to realize that Jesus dies this week. That is what this week is about. Christ is brutally killed. He dies and is buried. Our Lord, our hope is dead, and we are left facing a dark enclosed tomb.

Good Friday is not a happy time.

So why do we bother with it? Couldn't we just skip Good Friday? Clearly that's an option – most people never attend services during Holy Week. We go straight from the celebration of Palm Sunday to the joy of Easter Morning. Holy week is something we mention in passing, but really it isn’t something we like to dwell on or think about.

Yet we need to.

Why?

Because we’re Easter People, living in a Good Friday world. While I’d love to be able to claim that phrasing, it first came from a book by author and humorist Barbara Johnson. It is however a very accurate description of being a Christian in this world. Our world is not just the resurrection. Natural disasters strike, wiping out families livelihoods and hope. People are living without even the most basic of human care or concerns. We kill each other in war, out of jealousy, out of hate.

I would imagine many of you are in a Good Friday of your own. Waiting for test results to come in. Suffering through surgeries or treatments. Praying for someone that you love who is going through their own trials. Trying to figure out how to pay the bills this month.
By skipping straight from Palm Sunday to Easter, we are missing what it is like for most of us living in this world. We miss the message of this day – the message that relates to our lives.

True, it's a very jarring progression we make from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. We enter with joy, waving our palm branches, singing our praises to the king who comes in the name of the Lord. And we then bear witness through the ages as we hear him crying in anguish from the cross. Our emotions are stirred, sometimes in spite of ourselves, and we can find ourselves protesting, "How could they do it?"

I can almost understand Pilate: he was civil servant with a thankless job. Jerusalem is a terrible place to be assigned as a Roman – dusty little backwater place. He just wanted to leave - go somewhere else and find somewhere to live his life with his family. All he was trying to do that day was survive that job and he became caught up in a tightrope diplomacy act--trying to please the crowds to forestall a riot.

But what about the crowd? The everyday people. The people like you and me who began screaming for this death.

Looking back at what happened on that Thursday night and Friday morning nearly 2000 years ago, I find myself pulled in two directions. One is to wonder, "How could they do what they did?" I wonder about Pilate, walking the tightrope between the wishes of the crowd in front of him, close to riot, and the demands of his Roman rulers back home.

I wonder about the chief priests, sworn to never take a human life, and yet dodging their own law by getting the government involved, because of a man who threatened their authority.

I wonder about Judas, what it was that caused him to do what he did, and the despair he must have felt afterward that made him take his own life. I wonder about the crowds, the ones who called "Hosanna to the Son of David!" on the first day of the week but yelled out "Let him be crucified!" on the fifth.

On the one hand, I find myself condemning them. I would never do that… I hope. I can't imagine being a part of a crowd so bloodthirsty. I can't imagine giving into such an obviously unjust demand just for politically expediency. I can't imagine the level of hypocrisy needed to say "Thou shalt not kill," and then seeking a man's death. A few years ago I was asked to read for a passion play at a church. At one point I helped to play the part of the crowd in the story, shouting "Crucify him!" I found the words catching in my throat; I wanted so very badly not to say them.

On the other hand, I find myself letting those folks off the hook. After all, didn't Jesus do that? "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." he said, according to Luke. After all, how could they have known the impact their actions would have?

They didn't know this Jesus was really the Son of God. They didn't know he was fully God, and fully human. They didn't know he was the Word of God that took flesh, that he was the Lamb of God sent to take away the sin of the world, that he was without sin. They really didn't know what they were doing.

And yet, down through the centuries comes that cry, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" and along with it, Pilate's words: "Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him."

In some times and some places, this sentence from scripture has been used to justify the hatred and persecution of Jews. Christ-killers, they've been called. It's not true, of course. Sure, the crowds that day were Jewish. But the soldiers who carried out the wishes of the Roman governor were Romans, Gentiles.

And I believe that the desire to find who was really to blame--Roman or Jew, soldiers or priests, Judas or Pilate--I believe that that desire comes from a very deep, unsettled feeling inside all of us.

The feeling, the nagging doubt, that maybe the ones responsible for Christ's death were us.

I'd like to think that I'd never be in that crowd, never cry out "Crucify him!" I'd like to believe I'd never be a Judas or a Pilate. But, I'm not altogether sure.

Because, you see, the story is not over. I don't mean just that we get to hear the happy ending on Easter Sunday. I mean that Jesus continues to die in our world, every day.

Remember when he taught that whatever we do to the least of his brothers and sisters, we do to him?

So, when a family in Iraq becomes refugees because their village has been bombed out in the search for insurgents, Jesus becomes a refugee. When one of their children dies on the road because of malnutrition, cold and the flu, Jesus dies too.

When a young man is horribly beaten to death because he is gay, Jesus is beaten to death, too.

When a woman works in a sweatshop in Indonesia, earning a pittance and working fourteen hour days in an overheated unventilated factory with no sanitary washrooms facilities and no workplace safety standards at all, Jesus is working there. And when she dies in a fire in the factory because there weren't adequate exits, Jesus dies, too.

When we support these actions – when we turn a blind eye to what happens around us – we are responsible. It is our actions or inactions that continue to crucify our Lord.

And Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him."

Jesus dies in our world every day, and I'm not innocent of that blood. None of us are. We are still crucifying Jesus . . . ourselves. And so I give thanks to God this week, perhaps more than any other week, for the amazing love we have received in Christ.

For God, our loving Father, forgives us.

We are forgiven, just as Pilate and the soldiers and the crowds and the priests and scribes and even Judas himself have been forgiven, and not because we know not what we do in this Good Friday world.

We are forgiven simply because God loves us with a love that is so strong Jesus was willing to die for us.

That is the hope of this day. We are in the darkest hour in Christian history – Jesus is dead. The bombs are falling. People are hurting.

Yet we have a God who loves us so much, God will suffer with us. We are not alone in this dark hour – even as Christ drew his last breath and died, God remained with us. We are in a Good Friday world but God is still with us. God loves us even in the dark and the pain of our lives. We have been claimed as people of the resurrection, even as we dwell in the darkness.

That is our good news and our hope as we wait and pray for the dawn of the resurrection. Amen.

We will now sing the first three verses of When I survey that Wondrous cross.

As we head into Holy Week, perhaps you are in a Good Friday of your own. If you are looking for a church to support you during difficult or not so difficult times, we would love to welcome you to Westminster. Just speak with one of the pastors after the service and we’ll get you started.

Go now and fulfill your vows to the Lord.
Love one another as Christ has loved you
and give yourselves to one another in humble service,
just as Christ has given himself to you.
Celebrate these holy days as a perpetual ordinance,
for no gift could ever repay God’s goodness to us.

And may God hear you whenever you call;
May Christ Jesus keep you safe through his blood;
And may the Holy Spirit lead you further
into the depths of God’s saving mysteries.