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Homilies by Rev. Andrew Collis unless indicated otherwise.

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Good Friday, Year B
Cana Communities
South Sydney Uniting Church
March 30, 2018

John 18:28 - 19:30

‘What is truth?’

Today is Friday. Whether it will be Good Friday or not will depend on whether the cross has the last word, symbolising as it does the world of injustice, cruelty, oppression, fear and despair. If Friday is to become Good Friday there will have to be something more real, more profound and enduring than this.

What is truth? The life, the love, the hope that rises in community. Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker communities. The 78ers and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Aunty Shirley Lomas and 10,000 people from all over the state daring to believe in clean energy, clean air, clean water. Faithful Palm Sunday marchers insisting on the dignity and legality of human beings seeking refuge from persecution and violence … Truth is the life, the love and hope that rises in Cana Communities, with and between members of this Uniting Church parish.

This year we grieve the passing of loved ones including my father Laurie, Tom Cernik, Kate (Cott-ee) Scott … and bear witness to a love that, dare we say it (trembling, knowing the cost), increases us. Expands, refines, upholds, renews us. Resurrection, says one theologian, has everything to do with the new life of the Spirit … the real victory over death, the true disclosure of the deep things of life, the final revelation of God in the one who was crucified (Alistair Kee).

To many who lived in the first-century Jewish religious world Jesus was the Messiah, the agent of God come with power. To many who lived in the Hellenistic world he was the Logos, the reason of all things. To many who lived in the Byzantine world he was pantocrator, the unification of a divided world. And what will he be to us?

The Spirit of Jesus, dare we say it, is the spirit of justice, of equity, of reconciliation, of compassion, the basis on which all walls of partition, discrimination and domination are dismantled … We can be possessed by that Spirit, but we cannot possess or limit it to the concerns of the church … Let us pray …

Draws on Alistair Kee, From Bad Faith to Good News: Reflections on Good Friday & Easter, SCM, London, 1991.

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