GOOD FRIDAY - 3

GOOD FRIDAY  -  3

We are called to draw closer to the mystery of the cross.  On one level  -  a very human and real level, the cross is no mystery. It was a remarkably cruel method of execution, subjecting its victim to awful agony and suffering. It was certainly a symbol of horror, an object of terror and an eloquent witness to man’s brutality. It was a punishment reserved especially for those marked out by the authorities for the most merciless torture. The philosopher Cicero maintained that the word for cross should not be uttered within the hearing of a Roman citizen. One needs hardly any imagination at all to understand the dread and fear associated with this instrument of torture. There is no mystery about this aspect of the cross. Thousands before and after Jesus perished in this barbaric way.

Our personal experience of suffering, pain and sorrow is a call to participate in the passion of Christ, to be involved in the sufferings of our Lord, “to fill up what is lacking there in our flesh” (Col 1, 24), and it continues in us Christians till the end of time. We are called to commiserate in and suffer along with the world in all its wretchedness, fallenness, and faith.  Saints, like St. Francis of Assisi, known for their joy and exaltation and song, are also serious saints, steeped in the experience of physical illness and pain, psychological hurt and rejection and spiritual darkness. Still they sing.  Francis sang because his suffering made him one with Christ, who knew so much pain in his own life. Francis loved passionately and wanted to stand in solidarity with his Master in his rejection, temptations, lonely nights on the mountain, night in Gethsemane, on the cross, in the tomb. For him, it was a chance to enter into and share the fate of Christ. Francis wanted to be as poor as Jesus himself; and we are poor in the face of illness, old age, mental incapacitation, and death. We are all at a loss in the face of our mortality. Others, too, have sensed this “putting on Christ” and rejoiced in it, learning in faith to pick up not only their own cross but to shoulder another’s. This lesson of shared pain, compassion, acceptance of action with and for those who suffer is the concrete expression of the compassionate life and final criterion of being a Christian. Part of what makes us human as well as graceful is our ability to rise above the selfishness and individuality of our pain and to help and encourage another.

Now let us focus more personally on Jesus along the lines of the Passion narrative of St. John. There are two ways of looking at the death of Jesus. One way, and it possibly appeals to us more, is to say that he was the just and good man who found the forces of evil just too powerful for him. This picture is of Jesus as victim, betrayed, trapped, beaten up, summarily tried and executed. A familiar picture. The same thing has happened countless times, as we know, to men and women in every country. Every dictatorship, whether of the left or the right, has done this to people.

The other perspective is that of St. John whose Gospel account was read today. St. John is at pains to make clear that Jesus was in command from the very start of his Passion. Take the scene in the Garden of Olives. The guards have arrived. “Knowing everything that was going to happen to him”, says St. John, “Jesus then came forward.” This is not a man taken by surprise or caught unprepared. When they ask for Jesus the Nazarene and He says, “I am He”, they fall to the ground. When Peter wounds the high priest’s servant, Jesus says, “Put your sword back in its scabbard; am I not to drink the cup the Father has given me?” Here is a man who freely accepts the suffering, not a man on whom it is loaded.

The final traumatic scene at the chair of judgement shows Jesus standing in silent majesty, and Pilate like a cornered ferret in front of the crowd, publicly humiliated and outflanked.

We do not have to choose between these two. Both views are true. If Jesus was to share our lot as human beings, his Passion needed to have about it that experience of sudden and anonymous cruelty which, alas, goes with so much human suffering. Luke tells us that the men who were guarding Jesus were mocking and beating him. This is the casual ill-treatment of someone who is condemned in advance of his trial. The people who really hated him did not really need to lay a finger on him. In this sense Jesus is certainly the victim, as much as a victim as the 21^st. century person for whom men hoodlums come in leather jackets in the middle of the night, and drive him away at speed in an unmarked car, to be tortured by professional torturers, and never to be seen again by family and friends.

There is a divine planning and purpose in what takes place on Good Friday. God has come to earth on a mission of rescue. To save us from the most negative and dark wickedness, and give us hope, he has to plumb the depths of the negative and dark wickedness himself. An early Christian author speaks of Christ offering himself to Death like a poisoned bait: Death devours him, and is itself destroyed. There is princely deliberation in this, as Samuel Crossman says in his sublime hymn, “Yet cheerful he to suffering goes, that he his foes from thence might free.”

PRAYER (Gilbert Shaw, 1886 – 1967)

O Jesus, blessed Jesus, I gaze on thy Cross,

O Saviour suffering to draw my love:

was ever love like thine, or thanks so poor as mine?

Thy hands are outstretched for love of me and all mankind,

and with my sin I have pierced thee and keep on wounding thee;

Bitterly I sorrow, deepen my penitence,

Give me tears that I may weep,

Give me strength that I may amend.

Take me thyself, keep me in thy wounds,

ever mindful of thy presence,

ever to love thee, in pain and in bliss,

on earth and in heaven, with thee forever.

THE SUN HAS SET

The sun has set.

Our Son has walked into the night,

And that night was dark, indeed,

Made the more opaque

By one man’s treachery

That manoeuvred our sinfulness unto his death.

Our Son has walked into the night,

Laid himself down,

And now is still in death.

Sleep on, Saviour sweet!

Brave Warrior of our freedom’s battle;

Hero of our redemption’s drama.

Sleep on, dear Son and Brother.

Yesterday and today you laboured;

A splendid work, indeed,

But the weight thereof

Has laid you low

In a stone sepulchre.

Yet take your rest,

Tonight and another.

Yahweh once rested

At the close of the original creation;

Why not you

On the threshold of the new?

So sleep, sweet Prince,

And take your rest.

Tomorrow and a day will bring the dawn.

And with the dawn new life.

Then you will be King!

For our Son will rise again!