(Homily for Good Friday Year A)
O
dear Lord, what can I say to you on this holy night? Is there any word that
could come from my mouth, any thought, any sentence? You died for me, you gave
all for my sins, you not only became man for me but also suffered the most
cruel death for me. Is there any response? I wish that I could find a fitting
response, but in contemplating your Holy Passion and Death I can only confess
humbly to you that the immensity of your divine love makes any response seem
totally inadequate.
The above words of Henri J. M. Nouwen in his
book, A Cry for Mercy, introduces us well into the context of today’s
celebration, which culminates in the saving Passion of Our Savior and the Veneration
of the Cross, the symbol of our redemption. Our finite human minds cannot
comprehend nor explain the enigma of Jesus’ suffering on the Cross. Jesus died
to set us free, to raise the fallen humanity, and to save man created in the
image and likeness of God. But to do this, something needed to be done. It was obvious that only God can save man,
for man cannot save himself. Then the issue is: Can God do this by means of a gesture of benevolence from heaven?
But we know that no one has ever seen God. Can
it be accomplished through the angels? But the mission of angels is that of
a messenger, not a savior. It was only
possible through a man who is at the same time God. And behold, God sent
his Son Jesus Christ to come and redeem man. For in the Cross of Christ man rediscovers his real identity, his authentic
self, his origin and his destiny. He
is the unique Savior, only him can save man integrally and radically, in time
and in eternity. Thus demonstrating in a most radical way, the extremity of
God’s love towards us.
In today’s
liturgy the pronoun “We” and the
adjective “Our” resound in an unprecedented manner, they resound as the
unique and authentic motive of the Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The first reading (Is. 53:13-53, 12)
is insistent on this, when it says: “Yet ours were the sufferings he was
bearing, ours the sorrows he was carrying…whereas he was being wounded for our
rebellions, crushed because of our guilt; the punishment reconciling us fell on
him, and we have been healed by his bruises…Yahweh brought the acts of
rebellion of all of us to bear on him” (Is.
53:4-6). In this three verses of the prophecy of Isaiah we can see how many
times the words “we and ours” reoccured. In the Passion account according to
St. John (Jn. 18:1-19,42), which has
as a background the fourth song of the Servant of Yahweh, however, at the
beginining and at the end, it tried to deepen the import of the Passion with
two prophetic texts. The first prophecy is the one of the high Priest Caiaphas:
“It is better for one man to die for the people” (Jn.18:14), and the second is taken from the prophecy of Zechariah:
“They will look to the one whom they have pierced” (Jn. 19:37; cf. Zech. 12:10), this refers to the conversion and the
salvation of the nations by means of the redemptive work of Jesus. It was
equally at this backdrop that in the second reading (Heb.4:14-16; 5:7-9), the author of the letter to the Hebrews,
urges them: “Let us, then, have no fear in approaching the throne of grace to
receive mercy and to find grace when we are in need of help…he became for all
who obey him the source of eternal salvation” (Heb.4:16; 5:9).
Furthermore, the first reading
is suggestive of three important elements to the understanding of Christ’s
death: his suffering was innocent, vicarious and redemptive. The second
reading, instead, reveolves around the High Priesthood of Christ. The
author enumerated the characteristics of the High Priest thus: he can sympathize with our temptations and
infirmities because of his identification with man in the Incarnation; he prayed for deliverance and he was heard
(at Gethsemane deliverance is not an “escape from” but to “save from”), he learned obedience. Indeed, we may well
affirm that the Incarnation was so real that Jesus fulfilled the will of the
Father, not as an automaton, but through struggle and temptation and an
experience of learning.
Today, we
reflect on the Passion narrative of St. John. And each evangelist has his own
perspective of the Passion, and at the
heart of John’s narrative is the
perspective that the Kingship of Jesus shines through his humiliation.
Jesus sets the Passion in motion, for he voluntarily came forward to be
arrested. We can see how the temple police who were terrified by his
personality fell back. Peter tried to stop the arrest, but Jesus intervened. On the Cross Jesus made his last will
entrusting his mother to the disciple and his disciple to his mother. In
the Gospel of John, Mary is seen as the
symbol of the Church. We may say that the Passion narrative of John
elucidates the words of Jesus in John
10:18 “I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from
me, but I lay it down of my own accord”. For Jesus decides the moment of his
death: “He gave up his Spirit”.
Today we
see an expression of Love displayed on the Cross by our Lord Jesus Christ. It
is on account of this that our Lord Jesus said in the Gospel of John (15:13) that “No one has greater love
than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”. This is indeed what this
Friday stands for. So we thank God it is
Good Friday because on this day we received the highest expression of God’s
love. On this day, we received superabundance of God’s love. On this day God gave us His most ‘precious
possession’, namely His Son. This Friday is good because finally our
redemption is accomplished and the price of our sins fully paid (tetelestai).
The word “tetelestai” (it is finished, accomplished, fully paid) occurred
only in two places (Jn. 19:28.30), and these are the only two places it is found in
the New Testament.
Through his
death Jesus obeyed the Father, in the sense of perdoning his enemies. He
submitted whole heartedly to the will of the Father, who does not desire the
death of a sinner, but that he repents and lives. Christ accepted to die, in
order that his enemies that led him to the Cross might live, hence he forgave
them. On the Cross Jesus revealed this
profound mystery of God’s mercy and love. He emptied himself and was
humbler yet, even to accepting death on a cross (cf. Phil. 2:7-8).
Through
his event on the Cross, Jesus conformed to the will of the Father. Little
wonder, it is said of Jesus that: “He was insulted and he did not retaliate
with insults; when he was suffering he made no threats but put his trust in the
upright Judge” (1Pt. 2:23). He did not put his trust in the Upright
Judge so that he will punish his enemies and wrongdoers, but it was for the
purpose of saving them, irrespective of their freedom. “He made no
threats”, for he was not harbouring in
his heart words to oppose his adversaries; he was not looking or considering those that are making him to suffer,
but for those he was suffering for. What a Love in its extremity! St. Peter
further expressed: “He was bearing our sins in his own body on the cross, so
that we might die to our sins and live for uprightness; through his wounds we
are healed” (1Pt. 2:24; Is. 53:5).
At Getsemani Jesus touched suffering with
his bare hands and lived it on his flesh. Suffering for him was not a hear-say
experience. In fact, he “leanrt obedience through suffering” (Heb. 5:8). Jesus exclaimed “My soul is
overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Mk. 14:34). Jesus lived the highest point of suffering, what the mystics called “the dark night of
the Soul”, to the extent that He became sin, “For our sake he made the
sinless one a victim for sin, so that in him we might become the uprightness of
God” (2Cor. 5:21). When Jesus on the
Cross cried out “My God My God why have you forsaken me” (Mt. 27:46), this was because he had the experience of the apparent
disappearance of the Father. It was as if the Father left Jesus alone on the
Cross, after he must have condemned sin and passed judgement on the world.
However, in this traumatizing episode,
man could learn what it means to do without God, to reject Him and to Sin.
If Jesus could feel his apparent absence on the Cross, what more when we
decisively reject or abandon Him ourselves?
As a matter
of fact, we see the total self-emptying of Jesus and as such an entrance into Kenosi,
to the extent that he was subjected to all sorts of evil. On the cross all
sorts of evil befell on Jesus: ●PHYSICAL
EVIL: The death on a cross is the highest form of physical suffering and
corporal torturing.●PSYCHOLOGICAL EVIL:
Jesus was abandoned by all, he was denied and betrayed. He suffered solitude. We
cannot but remember the ingratitude of those who wanted Barabbas instead of
Jesus. There was the wickedness of those who gave him vinegar while he was
thirst.●MORAL EVIL: The injustice of
Pilate who suffocated and sacrificed the truth at the altar of unfounded
consensus. The condemnation and death of an innocent.●SPIRITUAL EVIL: Then here comes the pertinent question: where is
God? Here we see the seemingly absence of God, and Jesus feels this
abandonment: My God, My God why have you forsaken me?
To us, as we meditate and ponder on and on,
on the event of Jesus on the Cross, is as if He whispers to the ears of our
heart: “I did not love you, just for
joke”. Hence, our meditation on the
passion of Christ has to inspire us to contrition and pains for our sins, but
also to hope. A word of Hope, for us and for our brothers and sisters, for
those that are humiliated, offended, oppressed and those their dignity has been
dragged to the mud, even the present pandemic that has plunged the world into
panic. This existential experiences bring us closer to the Jesus of Good
Friday. However, the Cross of Christ is
a Word of Hope! Let us not hide this hope from anyone. For we have this
assurance of faith that: “If we have been joined to him by dying a death like
his, so we shall be by a resurrection like his” (Rm. 6:5).
Today
being Good Friday, is not a day to express sympathy (eeee yaaaa), no room for passivity, rather his suffering and death
should raise questions for meaning in our hearts, and thus lead us to
conversion. Today is not the day to admire the courage of the few women that
followed Him to the Cross, to condemn the acts of the Jewish religious leaders,
Pilate, the crowd and the disciples, or a day to merely sympathize with Jesus, rather it is a day to empathize with Him.
It is a day we should allow the
reality-show of his death to inspire us like the Centurion to proclaim who He
is in our life. For the Centurion: “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mk. 15:39). It is a day we are called
to allow ourselves to be transformed by His saving death. The visible sign or
fruit of the death of Christ in our lives should be that of transformation, in
every individual and in the sinful social structures of our society.
For the
sake of His Sorrowful Passion, have Mercy on us and on the whole world!
(Fr. Vitus M.C. Unegbu, SC)
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