· CHILDREN'S EDUCATION

· ADULT EDUCATION

· EFM

· JOURNEY TO
   ADULTHOOD
      RITE 13
      J2A
      YAC

· VACATION BIBLE
   SCHOOL

· SERMONS

· CURSILLO

· HAPPENING

· RESOURCE LIST
      Chapel Library
      Recommendations

SERMONS

Good Friday
April 6, 2007

By The Rev. Sylvia Czarnetzky

In the book of Leviticus, Moses describes in great detail a ritual for the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, In this ceremony, the Jewish high priest was to take two male goats, and place them before him, one on the left and one on the right. Then the priest would reach into an urn containing two disks, and he would grab one disk in his right hand, and one disk in his left hand, and pull them out. One disk said “for the Lord,” and the goat on the side of the hand holding the disk marked “for the Lord” would be sacrificed to the Lord as a sin offering for the people of Israel. The second disk was inscribed “for Azazel,” the name of a demon thought to live in the desert, and the goat on the side of the hand that held the disk marked “for Azazel” met a different fate. After the goat for the Lord had been slaughtered, the goat for Azazel would be led before the altar, and the high priest would lay both of his hands on the head of that goat, “and confess over it all the iniquities of the people, and all their transgressions, all their sins.”

And then that goat, bearing the sins of the people is set free -- it is sent into the wilderness to bear away all the sins of the people. That goat escapes. That goat excapes. The goat who escapes is the goat on whose head the sins of the people have been put, and he is sent into the wilderness to take those sins away -- to bear those sins to the place where evil was thought to dwell already. He is the goat who escapes. He is the “escape goat.” He is the scapegoat.

In fact, that’s where we get our word “scapegoat.” The word “scapegoat” was originally “coined by...the first great English Bible translator” William Tyndale. That’s what Tyndale called the goat who departs in the book of Leviticus, the goat that bore away the guilt of the community -- the scape-goat.

Of course, when we use the term “scapegoat” today, it retains some of its original meaning. Today, when we make someone a scapegoat, It is usually after the fact -- the scapegoat is the person on whom all the blame is heaped when something goes wrong -- someone we single out to blame for the problem or the failure, even if that person is innocent!

And that notion of making the innocent pay for the sins of others starts to fall into place: The scapegoat, who bears away the sins of the people, becomes the lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world. He is the ram that mysteriously appeared in the thicket just after God stayed Abraham’s arm -- the ram who took Isaac’s place on the altar of sacrifice, so that Isaac might live.

Jesus is our scapegoat -- our escape goat who away takes the sins of the community.

Jesus is our ram in the thicket, taking our place on the altar of sacrifice. Jesus is the sacrificial lamb. He somehow took our sins upon him, In some mysterious way “far beyond our understanding,” Jesus bears our sins away, so that we might live.

And that cross reminds us of how he went. The cross was the instrument of his death, and it was a terrible way to die. The paradox of this day is that The cross is the instrument ofdeath that God used, In order “to work a miracle of unprecedented life.”

And that’s what tonight is about. The mystery of the cross. The miracle of the cross. The cross where we keep vigil tonight. Tonight we gather at the deathbed of Jesus, only our gathering place is not a hospital bed, but rather the foot of the cross. And like family members gathered around the bed of a dying relative, we don’t have much to say – our attention is focused on the person we love -- the one whose breathing grows more labored as the hours pass. We watch and we wait.

We keep our vigil at the foot of the cross, watching and waiting for the death of Jesus, our scapegoat, our escape goat, our innocent who bears our sins on his back. We keep our vigil for the God who was willing to step into the oncoming traffic of death, to push us out of the way. Amen.