Creation.

A Sermon for Good Friday

April 18, 2025 at Presanctified Liturgy

John 19:30

“Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

In the first complete calendar of saints for the entire year, this is the entry for the twenty-fifth day of March: “On March 25, our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, conceived, and the world was made.”

We spoke just a few weeks ago about the conception of Jesus, the Annunciation. Commenting on the alignment of these two events on March 25, Saint Augustine draws an analogy between the virgin tomb of Christ and the virgin womb of his mother. Jesus receives not just human nature, but human mortality from his mother.

What about creation? Why has the church believed that Jesus was crucified on the day the world was made?

Today we have heard the Passion from St John’s Gospel. If we roll back in John to chapter 5, we find a scene where Jesus heals on the Sabbath. When he is confronted about this, he says, “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (v 17). The reaction is strong. The text says that “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (v 18). He had not just broken the Sabbath by performing a miracle. His answer, “My Father continues to work up to this very day,” undermines the whole principle of the Sabbath, that God rested from his work on the seventh day of creation (Genesis 2:2), and so should we. Jesus is denying that God’s work in creation was completed in the past. God, he says, is still creating.

Immediately before he dies, Jesus cries out from the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30). What is finished? His work in creation is finished. Dying on the sixth day, he will rest in the tomb on the seventh day, and a new era will begin on the eighth day, the first day of the new week.

Last Sunday, when we began reading the Passion stories, we said that Jesus’ purpose in dying was to fill all things, to descend to the depths so that there would be no place which his presence did not penetrate. Today, we are simply saying that another way, and adding the theme of creation. When God’s presence descends to fill all things—that is creation.

Christians traditionally say that God created the world “out of nothing.” But a few bold thinkers have pointed out that this means that the world was made “out of God.” Creation “out of nothing” means that God did not fashion the world out of any sort of pre-existing “stuff” that existed outside of God in eternity. God is the Absolute: in the true eternity of God’s Trinitarian fellowship, there is nothing but God. So when God creates, he creates by his “Word,” that is, from himself (John 1:1–3). Everything that has ever existed is from and in God. There is nowhere else that anything could be. God is the great Where.

So when we see the Word of God hanging on the cross, we see creation. We see the Word of God, coming from the Father, completing the Father’s will that all things be filled with God and so exist.

The main trouble with this way of thinking is this: what do we do with the violence of the cross? How is this divine creation? It looks like death, not life. It looks like nightfall, not morning.

But remember that the world is created in darkness. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). “Evening and morning”—not morning and evening—”were the first day” (v 5). Darkness comes first, then light. The trials of the world, as St Paul would teach, are the labour pains which precede the birth of a world of God’s children (Romans 8:22). Or as the Psalms put it, “His wrath endureth but the twinkling of an eye, and in his favour is life; heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30:5).

So the eye of faith has always looked at the cross and, yes, seen the darkness, but seen blazing through it the anticipation of a glorious morning. God has made all things and filled all things, and now we just have to wait for that first and final dawn which is coming. We gaze on the cross and discern the glory of God which is the final truth of everything. “In the cross of Christ I glory,” we might sing, or, as we just have, “My glory all, the cross.”

I leave you with a word from a Christian poet, who gave voice to the Good Friday faith that God’s glory is the truth of all creation, even when we see it presented to our eyes as suffering and death. This is “God’s grandeur,” by GM Hopkins.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.