Audio recording Sermon manuscript: I remember one of my seminary professors telling the classroom of future pastors that Good Friday is not a funeral for Jesus. That is to say, it is not an opportunity to open the vein of sentimentality and let it gush all over everything. There is a way of observing Good Friday where we feel good about feeling so bad about what happened to Jesus. In a way we hold up a mirror, while watching the sad scene with Jesus, to look at our own tears streaming down. The conclusions we draw is that we must be rather tenderhearted and good people—after all, just look how sad we are. Luke tells us in his Gospel about Jesus’s surprising response to some sentimental women who were following him while he was carrying his cross to Golgotha. It says, “A large crowd of people was following Jesus, including women who were mourning and wailing for him. Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. Be sure of this: The days are coming when they will say, “Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never gave birth, and the breasts that never nursed.”’” In this way Jesus ruined their pity party. They were having a nice time feeling sorry for the man, and then he has to make himself so unpitiable. What a jerk! I bet their tears dried up real quick. There is a different conclusion that we should draw on Good Friday than that we are ever so tenderhearted. Paul says in our reading, “We have come to this conclusion: One died for all; therefore, all died.” This is a very different conclusion. Instead of feeling like pretty good people, who have gone out of their way on this Good Friday, to attend Jesus’s funeral and to feel bad about he has been mistreated, we are confronted with this stark claim that we have died. And why have we died? Because we were irredeemable. God says in Jeremiah 17:9 that the human heart is deceitful beyond measure. It cannot be cured. It cannot even be understood. Feeling good about yourself for how you are feeling bad about something is crazy. But it is just part and parcel of our standard operating procedure. Our flesh is always looking for its own advantage. It looks at something or someone and says, “What can I use you for?” Thus we might look at the cross of Christ. Can I somehow get an emotional reaction out of this? I’ve seen many an individual at a funeral who resents the preaching of glad tidings of great news. It interrupts their feasting on their own sadness that they had been enjoying. Or how about how we snarl and snap and bite at our God when he tells us to do something good. As children we would get enraged at our parents for telling us to do something—some chore or whatever. That is sheer madness! Why should we resent it when what they are telling us to do is good and helpful? All of God’s commandments are for our good. So why do we get ticked off when he tells us we should pray to him or that we should not despise preaching and his word, but gladly hear and learn it? And when he tells us that we should be faithful to the spouse whom God has given us? Or that we should be content with the wealth that he has given us? Or that we should be generous and help others? Why do we hate God so much? It is as the Bible says that our heart is desperately wicked. It’s so wicked that we will never get to the bottom of it. And so don’t allow yourself the cheap luxury of believing that you are a pretty good person for how bad you feel about everything that happened to Jesus. That is a lie. What you are looking for is some proof within yourself that you must be one of the good ones. After all, just look at the tears. Do not allow yourself to draw that conclusion. Consider, instead, the conclusion that Paul makes: “One died for all; therefore, all died.” You hate God so much, and, specifically, you hate God’s commandments so much, that there was nothing else that could be done with you. You had to be put dow