Good Friday 2025
“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?” (Gal. 3:1)
Paul told the Galatians that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ had been clearly set before their eyes – and this was crucial to their obedience to the truth. But how had they seen it? They lived far away from Palestine, years after the crucifixion.
One of the striking things about the Reformed Protestant tradition is the lack of crucifixes in our worship. You will not find statues or paintings of Christ hanging on the Cross in our churches or religious art. Part of this is an historical point. Jesus Christ is not on the Cross anymore. He suffered once for sins, and He rose from the dead and is alive forever.
But part of the reason for this is also a theological point, which is that the Second Commandment forbids making images of God. This is because our attempts to picture the living God will always end up falling so short of the reality that they end up being some kind of lie. Jesus Christ is God, the perfect revelation of the invisible God, but God did not give us a picture of Him. And therefore, to make our own pictures, even of Jesus, to imagine what He might have looked like is always a false image.
The Heidelberg Catechism says that the Second Commandment means we must not make “any image of God,” and that “God cannot and may not be visibly portrayed in any way.” Then it asks, “But may not images, as books for the unlearned, be permitted in churches?” And the answer is, “No, we should not try to be wiser than God. He wants the Christian community instructed by the living preaching of his Word – not by idols that cannot even talk.”
We sometimes think that we know better than God, but this is always foolish. We think that if we have pictures or images we will understand better. But God knows us. He knows what we need. And the thing about images and statutes is that they are lifeless: they cannot talk. They put something before our eyes, but when it comes to seeing God, pictures cause us to see less not more. This is because God is alive. God is the fullness and abundance of infinite life.
But does this mean that God does not intend for us to see Him in any way? Not at all. In Galatians Paul said that Jesus Christ was set before their eyes clearly as crucified. So how was Jesus Christ set before their eyes as crucified? By the living preaching of the Word, as the Catechism says.
In the first instance, never forget that God has made His own authorized images of Himself in the human race, which at last count is around 8 billion people on the planet. God does not object to images of Himself at all. He simply objects to our clumsy attempts at making our own images of Him. But people are His authorized image of Himself. Male and female, they picture His creativity, His joy, His life.
And God became man like us, a perfect man. Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God. He was fully God and fully man from the moment of conception and throughout His life: the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. But from the moment of conception and throughout His life He was on a collision course with sin, death, and the Devil. He came as the Light of the World colliding with darkness and demons. But even then, the Revelation was still coming to a full boil. We see this sometimes when Jesus healed someone and told them not to tell anyone. And so often they went out telling everyone. But it was like He was an artist working on a canvas saying the full picture is not complete yet. It was like He was saying, ‘Wait, wait for the whole thing to come together.’
And so it was that the perfect Son of God, the perfect image of God came together as He was betrayed by a close friend and handed over to corrupt religious leaders. And they brought Him before a feckless magistrate and manipulated him into sentencing Christ to death. And soldiers stripped Him, beat Him, spit on Him, and mocked Him, and they hammered a crown of thorns on His head and they scourged Him with whips full of glass and stone and metal, ripping chunks of His flesh from His body. Then they made Him carry His cross through the streets of Jerusalem until He stumbled and fell and another man from the crowd was ordered to carry it for Him. And when they brought Him to the hillside outside of town, called Golgotha, which means place of the skull, they forced that lacerated back onto a wooden post and then stretched His arms out on a crossbeam and pounded spikes through His wrists and His feet – before lifting Him up naked, bloody, with searing hot pain ripping through His body, and dropped the bottom of the Cross into a hole in the ground. And He hung there gasping for breath, praying, with a thief and a murder on either side of Him.
Do you see Him? Do you see Him there before Your eyes? Do you see Him as the Sinless One mangled there in your place? Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. But this is why God has determined to portray this picture before our eyes through the “living preaching of His word.” A picture, a painting, a statue cannot even begin to capture what is going on.
One time someone asked George Whitefield if he would permit the printing of his sermons and he is said to have replied, “Well, I have no inherent objection, if you like, but you will never be able to put on the printed page the lightning and the thunder.” It’s the same with artistic renderings of the crucifixion. You can never capture that absolute glory. Even our best photography only grasps bits of glory, but there has never been another moment in all of history packed full of so much glory as those three hours when our Savior hung on Calvary.
Paint it, sculpt it, draw it – you simply can’t. Why? It will always be missing something essential. It will be missing the essential meaning. You can’t paint that justice. You can’t draw the perfect justice of that scene: the infinite offense our sin being fully paid for. You can’t paint that love: pure, selfless love. You can’t draw the love of God for a loveless race of fools and rebels.
But you can see it. You can see it clearly through the living preaching of the Word. It has been portrayed today clearly before your eyes so that you may believe that Jesus Christ was crucified for sinners and all who trust in Him are completely forgiven and have everlasting life, that you may obey the truth.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.
Leave a Reply