A young man was arrested and held in prison for three years without trial – in a country where human rights were being completely ignored and where the method of gaining prisoner’s co-operation was through torture.  The young man arrived, eventually in London and was cared for by people who looked after victims of torture. Eventually, he was able to give them a painful description of what happened to him:

After his arrest he was taken to a room covered with blood,

...there were a lot of broken bottles on the floor. There were three people present in the room…they wore no uniform. He was stripped naked; his hands and feet were bound and he was hung upside down from a bar on the ceiling with a rope around his feet. The torturers beat him with a wire cable, mainly to his legs and soles of his feet, and cut him on the soles of his feet with glass pieces. They burnt him with lighted cigarettes.

He was punched in the mouth and six of his teeth were broken. He was subjected to a mock execution. With five others he was blindfolded and taken outside and tied to a pole. When the shots rang out, only he was alive. He was then  thrown back into a cell with the five corpses..

The whole account makes harrowing reading and it comes from a book by Sheila Cassidy - Good Friday People - in which she meditates on the Passion of Christ by illustrating how Calvary is being lived out by people today - people who, sharing in reality the agony of Christ are truly ‘Good Friday People'.  Sheila Cassidy, a doctor and a spiritual writer has no doubt about the authenticity of the account she quotes. She herself was arrested and tortured in Chile because she gave medical aid in the name of Christ to someone the Chilean Government regarded as a ‘revolutionary’.

Next week, with the rest of the Christian Church, we shall go through the Holy week events and, hopefully, it will be a deeply spiritual experience for those who will make it their business to follow Christ each day from Bethany to Calvary. The Holy Week liturgy of the Church has a tremendous impact on the faith if we choose to make its observance a priority.

But for some, in our world, the Holy Week journey is not a spiritual experience but a physical one – a real sharing in the agony of Christ – and a  time when Christ shares in their agony because He has been through it.  I regularly receive a magazine produced by Christian Solidarity Worldwide, an organization dedicated to the plight of Christians today who are persecuted and tortured for their faith in Jesus Christ. The magazine carries descriptions of tortures that are not unlike that quoted by Sheila Cassidy.  The current edition arrived the other day and there are descriptions of persecutions being endured by individual Christians in  Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, North Korea, Peru, Eritrea, China, and Romania.

I set all this against today’s Gospel in which Jesus speaks of his own forthcoming trial and death.  The passage in John’s Gospel comes immediately after our Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem which followed the raising of Lazarus from the tomb. This miracle drew admiration and wonder from the ordinary people who found  a new hope in this unusual prophet from Galilee which they had despaired of ever seeing.   Ironically, their demonstration of hope in Jesus which reached a climax on what we now call Palm Sunday was tantamount to signing his death warrant.

Just before the Gospel passage we have just heard, the Jewish chief priests  had decided to arrest Jesus and put him to death. His popularity convinced them of the rightness of their action because He was a threat to their power over others.  Much the same happens today in those places where human rights and religious freedom are trampled upon by a few powerful and self-interested people – and for much the same reason. ‘Good Friday People’ are always at risk, especially when they try to work for change, for justice and for the primacy of love over hatred.  And, of course, Jesus knew this, just as those who have followed him to a martyrs death have known it. 

Whenever the evil of the world is confronted there is a risk and yet it is for many a risk worth taking. The risk is that they may become targets for persecution or even be exterminated.  Few who have followed Jesus down the Calvary road have had any illusions about where it was taking them.  To us they display a special kind of heroism but it must never be assumed that they welcome the torture or death torture they may endure as a result. They fear it just as much as you and I would fear it. And, it seems – as Jesus feared it.  “Now is my soul troubled” he says in today’s Gospel and this is the same kind of anguish that we find  in Gethsemane when every fibre of our Lord’s being was crying out against what was now becoming inevitable – his death. What should I say, his heart cries out, Father, save me from this hour?  Yes, that’s what he wants in his heart of hearts.

Was this a moment of cowardice?  It all depends on whether you think brave people should show no fear or whether you think that the real bravery is the acceptance of that fear and that despite it they walk on in faith even if butterflies are fighting a war in their gut.  Whatever Jesus felt deep inside it did not stop him from handing himself over in trust to his Father – It is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.  Archbishop William Temple, reflecting on this said that Jesus had lived for His Father’s glory and so will live unto death. His prayer, says Temple, is not to be freed from death, but that, whatever the cost, the Father’s name be glorified.

Whatever the cost! 

Jesus knew the cost and Good Friday People know the cost. As Temple also said, The sacrifice of love in face of selfishness or sin is always painful.   It is also totally self-giving.

Jesus liked to use illustrations drawn from nature because he lived in a rural society and such illustrations were easily understood. So he talks of a grain of wheat dying in the ground and out of its dying, a new growth appears. In dying is new life and Jesus is making the very clear point – not least to those who stand this side of Easter as we do – that only through his death can new life – eternal life – begin.

Now, of course, we know all that because, unlike those he first spoke to, we have the benefit of hindsight.  This, however, carries its own danger because we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that as Jesus has already made the supreme Sacrifice of Love and we enjoy the benefits, there is nothing for us to do. We simply accept the joyful message of Easter.  And in a sense that’s perfectly true. I wonder if that is why so many Christians by-pass Holy Week and move straight into Easter.  There’s nothing wrong with that – the benefits of Resurrection are the gifts God gives to His Church and we can enter into the completeness of his love with a simple thanks to Jesus for all he did for us on Calvary.

But – and as you might expect there is a ‘but’ – the assumption must be that there is nothing left for our Lord’s Followers to fight for – no struggles for freedom, justice and love to be entered into.  If that is the case what do we make of our Lord’s insistence that those who serve him must follow him and, where I am there will my servant be also?

Surely that must apply to all of us – not just to those who feel that the World still needs saving enough for them to really follow Christ and pay the price of love as he did – the ‘Good Friday’ people of our world today.  It applies to us because if we didn’t allow it to apply to us, we could easily change sides and become at one with those who still persecute Christ in treading down the weak, the vulnerable, the outcasts and the different in our society.

Now we might protest – when do we do that? We are not like those terrible regimes which destroy people and torture them and persecute them. Of course not!  But we all have it in us to ride roughshod over people’s feelings; to taunt them; gossip about them in a way which destroys their character; fail to offer the hand of friendship because we find somebody tiresome; bully people into accepting our view, our way of doing things; manipulating them; ignoring them as if they didn’t matter; shunning them if they are different; ridiculing others , and so on.  These are the scourges with which we whip the backs of others. And if we use them we are whipping Christ.

So, just in case we are tempted to do any of these things to others, we need to become ‘Good Friday’ people ourselves – we need to enter into the struggle of humanity to not only make good but to help release everyone – ourselves included – from the prison of sin and selfishness so that all can flourish – so that the wheat can grow into the rich harvest of the Kingdom – so that all may see and enjoy the glory of God made manifest in human lives on fire with Christ’s love.

We will not, I suspect, be called to die for our faith but that makes our responsibility all the greater. To those who have, much will be expected of them  says Jesus and if we have our freedom to worship and witness to Christ and his Saving love, then we cannot use that freedom selfishly. I’m all right, Jack (or Jill), has no place in Christian thinking.  Our freedom is given as a privilege and a privilege is to be used for the good of others.

The easiest way we can do this is to pray for the persecuted, to buy fair-trade goods, to send donations to Amnesty International or similar groups, to be involved in the human struggle but at a safe distance.  The less easy way is to make a greater effort to treat others around us as if they were Christ and to be careful how we behave towards each other – and so become more loving, especially to those whom to love is less easy than it is our friends.  The most difficult way is to carry another’s cross and make their burden ours.

I love a story connected with Mother Teresa about a girl who joined the House in Calcutta. She was sent out on her first day to touch Christ in the broken body of the poor in the streets of the city. When she returned she had a great beaming smile. She said that she had been touching the body of Christ for three hours and when asked how she had done this she spoke of finding a man who had fallen into a drain who had lain there for some time. He was covered with wounds and dirt and maggots. The girl had cleaned him and she knew that she was touching the body of Christ.

It’s a beautiful story but it terrifies me. I have to ask myself – Could I do that?  It’s exactly what a Good Friday person would do.  Maybe we would only know whether we could do it if it happened to us but in a sense we are all faced with these opportunities to serve others in a deep and involved way. Maybe not so dramatically but most certainly. Reaching out to others as if they are Christ because that is who they are – He is in the midst of us all.

Whoever serves me, follows me –even to Calvary wherever we find it in our own experience –and whoever serves me, the Father will honour.  But we are not to be Good Friday people in order to be honoured. We are to be Good Friday people because it’s all we can be if we really love and follow Jesus Christ. 

There is a something else – To be a Good Friday person is to become someone who understands what Easter is all about.  And that’s worth knowing!