Good Friday of the Passion of Our Lord
These holy days, this Sacred Paschal Triduum, are all about the Cross. In these moments, the cross takes center stage: it is, in fact the focal point of the Gospel. At his birth into our world, he was laid in a wooden manger, that wood that is the precursor of the wood of the cross. Throughout his public ministry, he journeyed to the cross which was the reason for his coming. And today, he mounts the altar of the cross as the priest, the altar, and the lamb of sacrifice, given for us.
There can be no greater demonstration of God’s love for us than we have in these days. We broken ones, the ones who incurred the sentence of death, have that sentence served by God the Word, the One who was with the father in the beginning, the One through whom all things were made. Our God is just and there is a price for sin. But our God is mercy and there is forgiveness and redemption and salvation.
Isaiah’s lament in today’s first reading catches us up in the emotion of Good Friday. The suffering servant’s appearance is so marred, stricken and infirm that we cannot bear to look at him. Because if we really looked hard enough, we know, in our heart of hearts, that the marring, the strickenness, the infirmity are all ours. All ours! This is a dark hour. It seems like all is lost.
We too will have dark hours of our own. That’s one of the few guarantees that this fleeting life gives us. We absolutely will have to bear our own cross of suffering: the illness or death of loved ones, the loss of a job, the splintering of a family, or even the shame of addictive sin.
It is our brokenness that we see in the suffering servant, our sinfulness on the son of man. And this suffering one is embodied by our God, Jesus Christ our Savior, who carries all of that nastiness to the cross, and hangs there before us, bleeding and dying and crying out to the Father. That’s our sin, our death, our punishment – and he bore it all for us. Who could believe what we have seen?
And just when it seems like there is nothing left to give, when it seems like all hope is lost, when it seems like death has the upper hand, the soldier thrusts his lance into the side of Christ, and our Jesus gives still more and yet again: he pours forth the life blood and water that plants the seeds of the Church into the barren ground of the earth, guaranteeing the presence of the Lord in the world until the end of time. Christ our God gives everything he has for us, takes away all that divides us, and performs the saving sacrifice that makes salvation possible for all people. Our God gives up everything – everything – for love of us.
We have the eyes of salvation history, we who have grown up in the Church. So we know that the suffering and death of Jesus is not the end of the story. In the day ahead, we will keep vigil for the Resurrection of the Lord which shatters the hold that sin and death have on us. We are a people who eagerly yearn for the Resurrection. We must certainly hope for the great salvation that is ours, and the light and peace of God’s Kingdom. But not today: today we remember that that salvation was bought at a very dear price, the price of the death of our Savior, our great High Priest. Today we look back on all of our sufferings of the past or the present, we even look ahead to those that may yet be. We see all those sufferings in our suffering servant on the cross. And as we sit here in God’s presence we know that we are never ever alone in those dark hours, that Christ has united himself to us in his suffering and death. As we come forward to venerate the Cross, we bring with us our own crosses: past, present, and future, and join them to the sufferings of Christ. In these moments, we unite ourselves to him in our own suffering, and walk confidently through it with him, passing the gates of salvation, and entering one great day into God’s heavenly kingdom.
We adore you, O Christ and we bless you: Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.
Discuss... Find me on Mastodon: @boxingpreacher@patmulcahy.com