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)
