Good Friday 2023

 

Good Friday 2023

 

Today we are called to look an absolutely essential aspect of our Catholic, which means universal, Christian faith.  We should not, and indeed cannot, identify Christian values with those currently prevalent in our Western world, because our present, faithless and deeply secularized, Western society and culture is quite perverse, often doing materially and socially good things for purposes we consider at the least perverted or even evil at times.  All such tendencies can be summed up conveniently in the exaggerated emphasis and value Western culture puts on living long to experience and enjoy all that life has to offer.

This fixation on satisfying human desire for pleasure – of even the most vulgar kind -- and worldly fulfilment – even of the most blatant kind – has led our Western society to regard death as the end of everything that is desirable or credible, and consequently death, with all its concomitant forms of suffering, is to be regarded as something to be avoided above all else. 

We Catholics and Christians, however, need very much to remember that we celebrate today, this holy FRIDAY, as GOOD beyond all measure, because on this day Jesus, Our Lord and Saviour, embraced suffering and death in their most horrific Roman form, out of, because of, love.  We celebrate this day with soul-shuddering wonder and joy because, on this day, Christ’s LOVE overcame mankind’s SIN, and thereby destroyed mankind’s subjection to sin and death, and offers us eternal life and beatitude with Him, in Him, in His Father’s heavenly Kingdom,

What is that wondrous, life giving, beauty-revealing-and-restoring, Christ(ian) love?  It is a flame, first lit when the Son of God chose to become, by the power of God’s most Holy Spirit, a man.

           Just as the Father knows Me, I KNOW THE FATHER; AND I WILL LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR THE SHEEP. This is why the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life in order to take it up again.   (John 10:15–17)

Who were those sheep?  Humankind, created in the image and likeness of God whom, though vitiated by their collusion with Satan, were eternally loved by the Father, and whom the Son -- for love of His Father -- willed to become  a human-being named Jesus through Mary of Nazareth, the most beautiful flower of God’s Chosen People.

Jesus came to live among us, one of us thanks to beautiful Mary, but not like us thanks to His heavenly Father; for Jesus came as perfect God and perfect Man to be our Saviour.  As Perfect Man He obediently embraced death for love of His heavenly Father, for the perfection of  God’s original creation, and for the salvation and redemption of sinful mankind, now flesh with Him and potential members of His glorious Body, to be freed by the grace of His blood poured out as one with us for love of the Father of us all.

Yes, People of God, today we celebrate Jesus’ death.  We embrace, rejoice in, Jesus’ death, Jesus’ way of dying, Jesus’ use of death, for us.  We regret, we mourn, we weep for, our own sins, and for mankind’s hatred, killing, self-centred and self-seeking disregard, of Jesus, His truth and His love.

Looking now, on this Good Friday, at the crucified Jesus, we recognize that, for Him, death was not the end but rather the climax of His life on earth; it was not the loss of all that He had loved, but rather the sublime moment when He was at last able to give supreme expression to the love which had filled His life.  When Jesus said, “It is finished”,  He was aware, and filled with joy that He had finally and fully completed the task His Father had given Him when sending Him into this world.  What was it that was finished?  Not simply the work of our redemption, because the full fruit of that has still to be gathered in over the ages by His disciples working in the power of His Spirit in the Church and in the world.  What then was finally and fully finished?  It was Jesus’ constant desire to give Himself entirely to the Father in His earthly life; to express, as much as the limits of His human body would permit Him, the consuming love He had for His Father (Luke 12:50):

          I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished! 

On Good Friday Jesus was finally able to say, “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit” and then He deliberately breathed His last.  Life did not just slip listlessly out of His grasp: He wholeheartedly gave over His life -- in total trust and absolute confidence -- to His Father as He breathed His last.  This final and total gift of Himself to the Father was, in that way, the fullest expression He had ever been able to give of the love that filled Him.  For Christians, therefore, death can be supremely desirable, should be supremely reverenced, because it offers us the supreme opportunity to express our love for the Father, our trust in Jesus, our hope in the Spirit.

We can gather some impression how Jesus longed, how long He had longed, to be able to give total expression to the depth and the intensity of His love for His Father when we recall that as a young boy, having been taken up to Jerusalem for the Passover feast, afterwards He had totally forgotten to set off back home to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph in the caravan, because of His absorption in His heavenly Father:

          After three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the  teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. (Luke 2:46)

Such a Son had forgotten all about Mary, His mother, about Joseph, and the journey back home, because He was totally absorbed in discussions with the teachers in the Temple concerning His Father in heaven!  There He was only 12 years old …. how great that blaze of love for His heavenly Father must have become by the time He was 30!!  And finally, the consuming intensity it must have attained over the last two years of His life, when He was occupied in His public ministry expressing and trying to communicate His love for the Father to the Chosen People of Israel, is, indeed, beyond our conceiving, for Jesus Himself found human words inadequate for His needs, since the only way He could begin to describe it, was, as you heard, “how distressed I am until it is accomplished“!

Now, however, on the Cross, that work has indeed been accomplished, that longing has been fulfilled: He has, at last, been able to give Himself entirely to His Father in total love and trust, to give Himself completely, not only with and in His human mind and heart, but also with and in His human body, given over, totally and completely on the Cross, for the Father’s glory!  Jesus had never tried to direct His own life, He had always tried to do His Father’s will and to follow His Father’s lead: even in the choice of one to serve as the foundation rock for His future Church.

To do His Father’s will had been the whole aim of Jesus’ life on earth, because, as Son before all time, His whole heavenly Being was a response of total glory, an expression of total love, for the Father.

That is how disciples of Jesus should regard their lives too.  We know that God has a purpose for us to fulfil: we believe that each of us has a distinct role to play in the realization of God’s Kingdom.   We do not know what that purpose is; no; the disciple has, like Jesus, only one aim: and that is, under the guidance of the Spirit of Jesus, to fully live out the Father’s will, going wherever He indicates, doing whatever He wills.  The disciple of Jesus knows that life is not, as with the animals, just for living; life has been given us for a purpose which God has planned, a purpose which, if followed out to the end, will lead to a revelation of the ultimate significance and glory of our being.

Dear friends in Christ, I can think of nothing better to take home with us from this holy hour, than a desire to die with dispositions like to those of Jesus, freed from the fear of death, loving and trusting our heavenly Father totally; and despising those ideals of love and prosperity being instilled into so many in modern western societies, and which have been recently formulated by one such ‘successful’ couple boasting:

“ We have sex four times a week and twelve holidays every year; we don’t have any kids, they would get in the way!”

 

(2023)