Good Friday 2022 – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church, Burns, Oregon, and Missions; April 15, 2022

We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.

Make no mistake about it, the man Jesus was handed over to be crucified because people believed that he claimed to be the Son of God, equal to God. Though all the evidence supported Jesus’ claim, the claim was so great and incomprehensible, so overpowering, so threatening to every world view and to all human pride, that it was rejected as blasphemy, an insult against God.

There you have it: Jesus was either a blasphemer or what he claimed to be, the Son of God, one God with the Father, the almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth. If he was what he claimed to be – and he is – that changes everything.

It also means that the rejection of Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus, was the greatest sin and greatest crime in human history, bordering upon the murder of God. I say bordering, because we need to remember Jesus’ own prayer from the Cross, which we heard on Palm Sunday, Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. (Lk 23:34)

Jesus’ own love and mercy, his own self-offering as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, his own expiatory sacrifice, outweighs the magnitude of the greatest crime of his crucifixion, a crime in which all human perpetration of evil comes to a point and focus.

Nevertheless, before we come to the mercy of the Cross, it would be good to dwell on what it means to ‘murder God’, remembering all the while that Jesus’ mercy outweighs this crime.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a despairing Macbeth, who had murdered his rightful king, reaches the point of declaring: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told be an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. (Macbeth, Act V, scene 5)

One could hardly find a more powerful, eloquent, and compact statement of the meaninglessness of human life. Turned into a doctrine and ideology, a whole way of thinking that goes far beyond the despair of a single individual, that doctrine of meaninglessness goes by the name of ‘nihilism’, from the Latin word for ‘nothing.’

Nihilism could well be the underlying and pervasive ideology of a dying and despairing western civilization. Sometimes it shows itself boldly in all the cynical despair of Macbeth, as can be seen (or heard) in the violence, crudity, and diabolism of certain music genres (though music is scarcely an apt name for it) like ‘death metal’ or ‘black metal’. The underlying world view is also contained in the belief that in the end ‘it is all just a world of atoms’ or the view of a vast machine of which human beings are nothing more than dispensable and interchangeable parts.

Nevertheless, since man cannot live without meaning, the worldview of nihilism more often masks itself. Instead of the manifest despair of a world without meaning, we more often meet with the celebration of the creativity of a purely manufactured, manmade meaning, like an artificial theme-park. Behind the relativism of ‘it’s right for me’ and behind the celebration of ‘pride’ and the creativity of ‘transgenderism’ is the despair of nihilism.

It is one of two things: either we belong to a bigger reality that we did not make and that gives meaning and direction to our life, or our life has no meaning and direction except that which we fashion for ourselves to fight off the despair of the void.

If we belong to a bigger reality, which we do, then it essential for us to get that bigger reality right; the truth is essential.

One reason for the despair of a bigger reality of truth is the despair of authority, “who is to say what is true?” Further, the despair of nihilism has already produced manmade ‘idols’, artificial systems of ‘meaning’ – like Communism or Hollywood or Disney – imposed by the powerful or those seeking for power.

You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth hears my voice.

Macbeth arrived at his nihilistic despair because he murdered his king; modern man has arrived at an advanced stage of nihilistic despair because we have rejected Jesus Christ, our King and our God, removing him from our public culture, our laws, our politics, our schools, all the institutions of society, and so we have joined our voices to the cries of the crowd. Crucify him! Crucify him! The pervasive nihilism of our contemporary society is the sign of a sort of ‘collective conscience’ that is haunted by the murder of God.

Someone will say, “But I believe in Jesus Christ!” Very well, but the modern ‘murder of God’ began centuries ago and the poison of nihilism has now spread to every nook and cranny of the culture in which we live. It has become practically a part of the ‘air’ that we breath, whether we are aware of it or not.

Let me give an example. In another town, I was having my teeth cleaned in a dental office, looking at the poster on the ceiling advertising an “I AM” photoshoot, which was I suppose meant to help youth build their self-esteem. They would have their picture taken with the words “I AM” emblazoned on the photo followed by self-assertion of their chosen quality of ‘strength’, their fantasy ‘super-power’. I suppose many would quickly applaud this effort to give encouragement and hope to our confused youth; at worst people would see the whole thing as innocuous. That is because we have moved so far from God.

The name of God, revealed to Moses, is I AM, because only he possesses existence in himself and with existence meaning and life and wisdom; only he is the original source of all existence, life, wisdom, and goodness. Everything we are and have comes from him and is borrowed from him.

By all means we must hold fast to our faith in Jesus Christ, but we must also examine the coherence of our ways of thinking and acting, even what we accept and promote for our children and grandchildren.

What is primary in our life? The duty by which we subordinate ourselves to a greater order to which we belong, the order of creation and the order of salvation, the order of the Church, which comes to us from Tradition, an order that comes from God and leads us back to God? Or an self-asserted identity that we fashion for ourselves and the emotional satisfaction and self￾expression that is bound up with that identity, our personal I AM, our private idol?

Jesus said, When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will know that I AM. (Jn 8:28)

In Jesus’ time he was lifted up on the Cross and in the midst of his crucifixion the glory of his unconquered godhead began to shine forth. It shone forth because no one took his life from him, but he was taken in the garden only by his own permission and laid down his life of his own accord. He said beforehand, No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have the power to lay it down and I have the power to take it up again. (Jn 10:18) So it is that freely and by deliberate choice he bowed his head and handed over his spirit.

So Isaiah prophesied long before: If he gives his life as an offering for sin, he shall see his descendants in a long life – that is in eternal life, in heaven.

And the letter to the Hebrews, he became the cause of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

Jesus said, As Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. (Jn 3:15) When the Israelites had complained against God and were plagued by deadly serpents, Moses lifted up, at God’s command the bronze serpent and whoever looked upon the likeness of the serpent was healed of the serpent’s poison. So whoever looks with faith on Jesus Christ crucified, who bears the likeness of our sin, is healed of the devil’s poison and for him the gates of heaven are opened.

We heard that after he died a soldier came and pierced his side with a lance. An eyewitness has testified – testified precisely to the detail of his pierced side and the blood and water – and his testimony is true; he knows that he is speaking the truth – the truth that sets us free – so that you also may come to believe.

The evangelist, the eagle-eyed St. John, is curiously insistent on the importance of the pierced side of Jesus on the Cross, the gateway to his Sacred Heart, the source of all grace, the fountainhead of the Church’s sacraments. There is the healing for all our wounds. There is the strength of our faith, if only we will look with repentance upon him whom we have pierced and say, like St. Thomas, but even before the celebration of the resurrection, my Lord and my God.

(Related: Easter 2022 – Sermon by Father Levine)