Homily for Good Friday 2008

A Homily for Good Friday

Preached at St Matthias’, Bellwoods, Toronto Friday, 21 March 2008

I take my text for today not from the words of scripture but from the Church’s liturgy, the second Eucharistic Preface for Holy Week, in which we give God thanks and praise, “through Jesus Christ our Lord, who for our salvation became obedient unto death. The tree of defeat became the tree of victory; where life was lost life has been restored.” The more ancient liturgy said, "that whence death arose, thence also Life might rise again: and that he who by a Tree was once the vanquisher, might also by a Tree be vanquished."
On this Good Friday, as we stand before the cross of Jesus, let us contemplate the deep mystery that these words express. What does it mean to say that life has been restored where life was lost? What is the tree of defeat, and how can it become the tree of victory? A thousand sermons or a million learned expositions cannot explain such a mystery as this as well as one simple story that our ancestors in the faith developed over the years in their love of Christ and his Cross. If we it myth or legend we must remember that myth is only story meant to convey truth, and a legend is literally something to be read, whether fact or fiction. So as we stand at the foot of the Cross this Holy and Great Friday, let me tell you the traditional legend of the Holy Cross.*

Adam and Eve broke the commandment of God by eating the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; for this God drove them from the garden of Eden to a hard existence of tilling the soil. They and all their posterity were afflicted with woes, and in the end died, as we do today, for God had barred he way to the tree of life. Adam, we are told, lived nine hundred and thirty years and then died. In his last weary sickness he sent his son Seth to Paradise to ask for promised oil of mercy. Seth came to the gate of Paradise, where the way to the tree of life was guarded by the cherubim and the flaming sword; there St. Michael the Archangel appeared and said to him: “Do not waste your effort seeking this oil: for you may not have it till five thousand and five hundred years be past.” Nonetheless he gave Seth three pips of the fruit of the tree of which Adam had eaten, told him to place them under his father’s tongue, and promised that when they bore fruit, then Adam would be healed. Three days after Seth had returned Adam died. Seth put the pips under his tongue and buried him. From the three pips there grew up three rods, of cedar, cypress, and pine. They remained growing from Adam’s grave. Some say it was in the vale of Ebron, others that it was outside Jerusalem.

Our ancestors delighted in fitting any and all available details into one complete whole, and if we searched we could probably find every bit of wood mentioned in the Bible worked into in one version of this history or another. So we are told elsewhere that Moses found the three shoots and carried them with him on the wanderings of Israel, and that they are the staff of which the scriptures speak, and that he took them to his secret grave. Long after David was led in a vision to bring them back to Jerusalem. When he left them in a tank overnight he found that they had grown into a single tree. David wanted to use its wood in the Temple, but was told that that work was not for him, but for Solomon his son.

Be that as it may, it is with Solomon that we pick up the central thread of the story again. When Solomon was building the temple the workmen were at a loss for one suitable beam in a some important part of the structure; they begged the king’s permission to cut this holy tree down, sure that it would make a fine beam, but wherever they tried to use it this beam shrank or stretched so that it was useless. The builders rejected it and would have thrown it away, but Solomon in his amazement set it up at the temple door to be venerated. There a wise woman, Maximilla by name, sat on it unawares, and her clothes caught fire and she prophesied; after that it was set across a brook on the edge of the city, so that people could walk across it.

Now when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon and saw the wood, she refused to cross the stream by it but lifted her skirts and waded across the brook instead. For in her wisdom she foresaw that this wood would one day bear the Saviour of the world, and bring about a new covenant. Fearing this meant evil for the people of Israel, Solomon had the wood buried deep in the ground.

Afterwards, in the place where the wood was buried, a pool was built in which the animals for sacrifice in the temple were to be washed. This was the pool Bethzatha or Bethseda of the five porticos on which an angel had come down and stirred the water and the first sick person to enter it was healed of whatever disease they suffered.** It was the virtue of the wood buried there which was raised by the moving water, and not only of the angel.

It happened that, when the time came that the sin of Adam should be cured, the tree arose and floated on the water, and this timber was taken and cut and made the cross of our Lord. The legend goes on to tell how the cross of Jesus and those of the thieves were buried after the crucifixion. In later years Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and then rebuilt; the Emperor Hadrian had a temple of Venus built over the site of Golgotha. Long afterwards, when the Emperor Constantine had been cnverted by a vision of the Cross, and won a great victory by making the sign of Christ his standard, he commissioned his mother St Helena to see to the building of a Church in Jerusalem. She cleared away the pagan temple and in the process of building, discovered the true Cross. These relics of the True Cross kept in Jerusalem were the beginning of the liturgical Adoration of the Cross which came to be imitated in other churches and which we celebrate here at St Matthias’. The story of how the Cross was recognized must wait for another day; we have followed the story of the true cross far enough for this Good Friday. Or else where would we stop? The legends say so much: how Golgotha, the place of the skull is so called because it is the place where Adam is buried. In countless paintings of the crucifixion you can see a skull at the base of the Cross: in this legend we find the meaning of the symbol; or we might consider how the old Adam’s skull was the container into which fell the new Adam’s precious blood; and how by dying on a Friday the Word of God recreated the human beings he had called into being on the first Friday of the world.

The history of the True Cross might seem just the product of a vivid (if not fevered) imagination, but it is meant to show how after all that time and all that history, the cross by which we are saved was in fact the tree by which we were damned. In a sense it is all a commentary on the words of St Paul, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” The Tree of Adam’s fall indeed bore fruit when Christ was hung upon it, and his blood is the promised oil of mercy and healing. All the elements that have been gathered into the story—far more than we have had time to mention—are moments of power, of healing, of mercy; it is a deep truth and mystery to see them as parts of the story of the Cross, for the Cross stands at the centre of history and from it grace flows to past and future. It is because of the Cross, as the letter to the Hebrews tells us, that the throne of God is the throne of grace.

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*There are many versions of this history ; see Barbara Baert, trans. by Lee Preedy, A Heritage of Holy Wood: the Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image (Leiden, Boston, 2004), and Arthur Napier, ed., History of the Holy Rood-Tree, a Twelfth Century Vesion of the Cross-Legend, EETS (London,1894). The version presented here is based on Caxton’s edition of the Golden Legend, with some material from other versions.

**See John 5.2-5.