The final days of the Lenten season bring us to the foot of the Cross. It is an ancient tradition in Rome to read the Gospel of the Passion on the Sunday before Easter, and of course on Good Friday Christians throughout the world commemorate the death of Jesus. Why is this Friday “Good”?
The purpose of Christ’s saving death is to restore our relationship with God, as Saint Paul tells us: “And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him...” (Col 1:21-22). We may think Saint Paul exaggerates when he calls us “hostile” to God; part of the blindness caused by sin is that we minimize its effects. We need to heed the admonition of Christ, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Mt 6:24). We glimpse something of the enormity of sin in the dreadfulness of Christ’s Passion and death. In a meditation for the Stations of the Cross, Cardinal Newman has Jesus say, “I am suffering now, but I shall triumph; and, when I triumph, those souls for whom I am dying, will either be my dearest friends or my deadliest enemies.” We cannot be mere “acquaintances” of God -- we are either friends or enemies. The extent of God’s desire for our friendship is shown in the body of his beloved Son nailed to the Cross. What more could the Father do for us than this? Meditation on Christ crucified is the antidote to both presumption and despair: when we think lightly of our sins, we should recall what those sins cost him; when we are overwhelmed by our sins, we should remember that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more (Rom 5:20).
The sacrifice that restores our relationship with God also drains the poison infecting our relations with one another. The human pride that exalts self at the expense of others and divides the world into “us” and “them” is brought low by the humility of Christ who was driven out of the city and condemned to death with “them”, the outcasts. In his death, Jesus was “reckoned with transgressors” (Lk 22:37) to demolish the barriers erected by ambition, fear and self-righteousness. Human harmony was wrecked by a tree, and it is restored by one -- the Cross. Saint John brings this point home when he describes the Mother of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple standing beneath the Cross. The climactic moment of the drama of the crucifixion comes when Jesus says to Mary, “Woman, behold, your son!” and to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” (Jn 19:26-27) The Evangelist tells us that after he said this, Jesus knew that all was now finished – he had completed his mission. A new kind of human bond had come into being, stronger than kinship, treaties or contracts: the bond of faith. Christ reconciles us to the Father by his death, and in the power of that love our human ties are transformed.
Why is this? Because Christ lives in us through the gift of the Holy Spirit; we no longer love solely with our limited human abilities, but with the love of Christ himself. His love is not self-seeking or calculating, but generous and sacrificial. Cut off from God, we are left to our own resources -- and when we are honest with ourselves, we recognize how meager those resources are. The new family of believers at the foot of the Cross is quickened by the breath of the Holy Spirit and nourished by the blood and water flowing from the pierced side of the Second Adam. The new commandment of Christ, “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34), seems impossible for us to fulfill until we recall that he also said: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love” (Jn 15:9). This is the miracle of Cana: the water of human love, essential to our survival, is transformed into the wine of divine love, the source of our joy.
There is another way in which the Cross of Christ heals our human relations: not only in our ability to love, but in our desire to be loved. Deep within each of us there is a tremendous hunger to be cherished, to feel that someone loves us completely, unconditionally and without limit. No human being can give us this love; how much misery is created when we expect that kind of love from another creature who is, like ourselves, weak and limited. The problem lies, not in the desire itself, but in the expectation that anyone other than God can meet it. When our communion with God is restored we no longer expect a friend, a spouse, a parent, or a child to give us the kind of love that only God can bestow.
That Friday did not seem good to the disciples. When Jesus first foretold his Passion and death, Saint Peter would hear none of it: “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you” (Mt 16:22). When the drama of the Passion began to unfold in the Garden of Gethsemane, the leader of the Twelve first resisted it with the sword and then fled from it in terror. Only after the Resurrection, in the strength of the Holy Spirit, was Saint Peter able to stretch out his hands to welcome a martyr’s death for the glory of God. He had learned the intimate connection between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. His companion in martyrdom, Saint Paul, wrote from prison: “Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse … that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil 3:8-11). The Cross alone can bear us to Easter; Easter alone can make the Cross bearable.
Justin Martyr
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