This sermon was preached on the 18th of April 2025, Good Friday, in the Anglican Parish of Kalamunda-Lesmurdie
Texts:
“It’s nothing personal.”
If you watch one of the Passion movies, you can almost hear those words going through the heads of the Roman centurions, as they brusquely drive nails through each of the limbs of Jesus.
Crash goes the hammer, driving a nail, crude and blunt, through tender flesh and into wood.
The Victim screams in agony.
“It’s nothing personal,” the centurion thinks.
Yesterday I spoke about how we are becoming, more and more, a disembodied society. But today I would like to go further. We are become a dehumanised society: a society in which our very humanity, our very personhood is being forgotten.
And this is wrong. It leads us into error, even into evil.
We must remember that our fellow humans are people. People made in the image of God. And so what happens to them, at our hands, or the hands of others, is personal.
When I look upon the Cross, when I hold it in my mind’s eye, I see my dear Lord Jesus hanging from a tree. Nailed there by people… people doing a day’s work. People who left Jesus there, struggling for every breath, stripped of every dignity. People who left Jesus to be dragged, inch by inch, gasp by gasp, away into death.
It is personal.
To say that it isn’t is to lie. And this is true for all of the violence that we human beings do to one another. To injure one’s fellow person, or to injure ourselves, is to profane the image of God: it is to profane God, Godself.
It doesn’t matter if there are rules involved, it doesn’t matter if we are following the orders of another. It doesn’t matter what excuse we concoct. Whether injury comes via physical assault, or through ostracism, bullying, denigration, or passive aggression, violence is and always will be personal.
Jesus shows us this on the Cross.
When she was thirty years of age, Julian of Norwich, the great English mystic and theologian came near to death. Her priest held a crucifix before her eyes, and she fixed her gaze upon it. As she prayed her last moments, God made haste to her, and she saw, and she was healed.
These are her words, disclosing to us one of the visions of Divine Love that she was gifted:
At this, suddenly, I saw the red blood trickle down from under the crown of thorns – hot and fresh and flooding out, as it did at the time of his Passion when the crown of thorns was pressed into his blessed head – he who was both God and man and who suffered for me. And I knew in my heart that he showed me this without any go-between.
And while I saw the blood flow from his head I never ceased from saying “Blessed be the Lord.’
In all this I was greatly stirred in love for my fellow-Christians, for I wanted them to know and see the same that I saw, so that it would comfort them. For this sight was shown for all the world.
For God is all that is good, as I see it, and God has made all that is made. And they who loves their fellow-Christians, for God’s sake, loves all that is. And they who loves thus, loves all.
(‘Enfolded in Love’ – Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich, published by the Friends of Julian of Norwich)
God caused Julian to see, and now she shares God’s gift to her with all of us.
Upon the Cross, we see the Son of God, the Son of Man, Jesus, human and divine, bleeding and dying. And at the same time, in the same moment, with the same eyes, we see the glory of our God, most profoundly disclosed to us.
We see that God is all that is good. God desires mercy. God desires healing. God desires reconciliation. God in Jesus Christ suffered and died upon the Cross in order to bring about all of these things.
God took an instrument of torture and death, and made it a throne. God took the dead wood of the cross, and made it the Tree of Life.
Jesus, through his one perfect sacrifice, has ransomed us from evil. We have been ransomed from the very forces that would have us say “it isn’t personal” while we do great harm to one another.
God, Holy and Triune, has won for us our freedom: freedom from fear, freedom from sin, freedom from death. Freedom to love.
Jesus, with his dying breath, blew upon the embers of God’s image that we bear in our hearts, and caused that image to shine brighter than it had ever shone before. The image of God, Holy and Triune, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three persons in one eternal community, together creating, together redeeming, together sanctifying.
The Son died upon the Cross. And the Spirit descended to the Son, diving, Her wings unfurled, making haste to Him. And the Father… the Father upheld the Son, cherishing Him, loving Him to the end.
This is the image we bear. The image of the eternal community, the image of the Trinity, the image of God who took upon themselves the worst that we can do, and replied not with vengeance, but with eternal life.
For God is all that is good, and God has made all that is made. And they who loves their fellow-Christians, for God’s sake, loves all that is. And they who loves thus, loves all.