Christopher Snook: Sermon for Good Friday

Christopher Snook, April 2 2021

He saved others. Himself he cannot save.

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Charles Williams is a name well-known to many in the Chapel community as he is, in a less direct but nonetheless real sense, to the larger community of the Foundation Year Program. A long-time friend of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers, Williams has been called the “oddest” inkling – the most unusual and idiosyncratic member of that ecumenical group of Christian writers who produced in the last century some of our most enduring fantasy tales, from the stories of Narnia to the world of Middle Earth. Williams is best remembered for his unique articulation of what he called the “open secret” of the doctrine of the co-inherence, that key insight that in things both natural and supernatural the world is composed not of isolated individuals but of those who live of necessity in and through one another through a series of what he called substitutions and exchanges. The mother substitutes her life for that of the child in her womb; Christ exchanges his life for ours on the cross; we substitute our lives for one another through the habits of humble service embodied for us just last night in the Lord’s washing of feet. Williams articulated this theme of the coinherence with reference to multiple succinct sources – St Paul’s “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me”, St Felicity’s “Another [Christ] lives in me”, and the Pauline injunction from the letter to the Galatians, “Bear ye one another’s burdens.” All of these are perhaps best summed up in the simple biblical observation that we are “members one of another.” But it was in 1939 that Williams succumbed to the pressure of friends and established a new order or intentional community in the Church that would take this doctrine as its animating principle. He called the group the Companions of the Coinherence. And he prefaced their rule of life with words that I would like to place at the heart of our reflections this morning: He saved others, himself he cannot save. This is, Williams writes, “the taunt flung at … Christ at the moment of his most spectacular impotency… It was a definition as precise as any in the works of the medieval schoolmen…. It was an exact definition of the kingdom of heaven in operation…”. It was an exact definition of the kingdom of heaven in operation. He saved others; himself he cannot save. This morning I would like us to consider how and in what way these words, intended as an assault, in fact constitute a kind of charter of the heavenly kingdom.

But let us begin by reminding ourselves that today is Good Friday, the day that Christians throughout the world are mysteriously gathering to adore and to love what by all worldly standards is complete failure. Just one week ago, you will remember, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. The crowds had gathered around him and proclaimed him King – Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, they shouted – and it seemed as if a great victory awaited Jesus. Surely these crowds, galvanized by news that this Jesus could work miracles, that he had spoken out against the religious rulers of the day, that he was fulfilling the old, old prophecies that a Messiah would come – surely these crowds had found in this Jesus one who would renew and revive the city.

But if that was the hope, then the crowds were no doubt correct when by Good Friday they had either dispersed or had become openly hostile to Jesus. Rather than calling up a militia to overthrow Roman rule, he is arrested. Rather than arming his disciples to defend him, he is abandoned. Rather than convincing the religious authorities that he is the Messiah come to redeem a struggling people, he is accused by them before the law.  Today, on Good Friday, all of the worldly expectations of God’s people and even of his disciples seem hopelessly naive. Where is the Kingdom that Jesus promised when on Good Friday he is arrested and sent to his death? Where is his power to heal, when he does nothing to stop the blood from his own wounds? Where is the Life, and the Truth, that he proclaimed had come into the world in Him when he is assaulted by lies and does nothing to defend himself?

We must begin our reflections by acknowledging that from a worldly perspective, what we are witnessing today is failure. And I wish to suggest that this failure is summed up in those simple six words so precious to Charles Williams and hurled at Jesus as he hung upon the Cross: “He saved others,” shouts one of the passersby, “Himself he cannot save.”

When these words were first spoken I suspect that the crowd had heard the stories of Christ’s life and ministry. Those first words “He saved others” are a kind of description of all that Jesus accomplished -- he was endlessly at work to save others. Consider, for example, his healing of the lepers; or his rescue of the woman caught in adultery on the day she was sentenced to be stoned. Consider his raising of Lazarus from the dead, his forgiveness of sin, his teaching of the Beatitudes – endlessly over and over again Jesus was at work in his earthly ministry to save others. He saved them from illness, from guilt, and even from death. “He saved others.”

 But the scoffers go on to say that this self-same Jesus who saves others seems to have no medicine for himself, no power to save himself from agony and death. He saved others; Himself he cannot save.

And what I want to suggest this morning is that these last four words (Himself he cannot save), though spoken in accusation and insult, in fact describe the deeper and more fundamental reality of all of Christ’s life and ministry – these words capture what Williams calls “the kingdom of heaven in operation”. Christ described the operation of that kingdom in his many strange and apocalyptic sayings: to save your life you must lose it, he says; unless the grain of wheat die it will not bring forth fruit; greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. But crucially, it seems to me, this habit of love that Jesus places at the heart of his kingdom is a habit that belongs not simply or even primarily to his earthly life. Rather, this habit of a love that saves others and seeks not its own belongs to Jesus from all eternity. For as we gaze at the crucified Jesus this day we must always remember that this Jesus is also God, fully human and fully Divine. And for Christians the life of God in Himself is the life of self-giving love. The Father pours himself and all that he has into the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit and this same love is returned in the Spirit to the Father in what is sometimes called the eternal dance of the triune God. No person in the Godhead withholds anything of his own from the other but all engage in a kind of mutual self-emptying and filling, a kind of kenotic communion we might say (though I am mindful that this may stretch the language of trinitarian theology). What matters is that when Jesus is born into the world he continues to insist on this dance of selfless love. As so he tells us, for example, that he does and says nothing that does not come to him from his heavenly Father. And he goes on to say that when the Holy Spirit comes, the Spirit will reveal only what Jesus has told him. The Father, the Son and the Spirit from all eternity live the habit of saving not themselves but seeking only the good of the other. And it is this eternal and divine life which enters the world in Jesus of Nazareth.

The story of Good Friday is really the story of this divine love, the trinitarian life of selfless adoration determined to draw the world up and into its own dance. But of course, in order to do that, this love must find us. And so, as we suggested last night, in Christ’s betrayal this love seeks those who have been betrayed, in his isolation he seeks the lonely, in his poverty he seeks the spiritually destitute, and in his dying he seeks each of us in the grave. Whatever else may be true about Good Friday, this at least must be said: that Jesus on the Cross is what God seeking us look like. He saves others; Himself he cannot save.

This is a great deal to have said already and an awfully long discussion of a very short text. So, let me conclude with just this observation. It was in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, that Charles Williams founded the Companions of the Coinherence. The life of the order was not in any worldly sense a success. Indeed, the most important fruit of the order’s life was, it seems to me, not that it succeeded as a long-term experiment in the life of the Church (it did not) but rather that the record of its existence sets before us the fundamental logic of our redemption – that he, our Christ, saved others and himself he could not or would not save. This is, as Williams noted, the logic of heaven.

And as Williams saw when he wrote the charter for his Companions, there is some sense in which what is true of Jesus must through him become true of us. He saved others, himself he could not save. We are to save others; ourselves we shall not save. Williams succinctly described what this might look like in his famous novel, Descent into Hell. There, he writes, it is a law of the universe that each of us must carry a burden for another (save others, as it were); and each of us must be carried by another (for we cannot save ourselves). This is, as Williams wrote, the kingdom of heaven in operation.

Yet it seems to me that to become the love which does not count the cost is a possibility for us only inasmuch as we remember the good news of Good Friday. For the Good news of today is not that we are capable of great love – the good news is that we are loved with a great love. Inasmuch as we remember that the love we hope to be is first and foremost a love that we are shown – inasmuch as we remember this and feed on it in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving there is indeed the possibility that we shall become the love that we adore this day. “He saved others; himself he cannot save.” AMEN.