Each Good Friday is a time of silence and reflection. It is a time for all Christians to look deeply into the Cross of Jesus Christ and seek meaning, hope and courage to confront the sin of the world. We have all watched in sadness the fire that consumed Notre Dame in Paris earlier this week. And these big events can consume us in many ways but they can also help us to focus on what is most important, especially the suffering of so many around the world. Throughout the week I have been hearing stories…yesterday, Holy Thursday, a friend ask me to pray for Nicaragua as they suffer and as violence continues…earlier I received an email for a parishioner from Venezuela asking for prayers for her family as one member is sick and cannot get the medical care needed…a parishioner from Nigeria asked for prayers for his village and country as a church was burnt and the people were threatened if the celebrated the faith…and there are members of the Coptic Christian community in Egypt whose churches were destroyed and closed for Holy Week.
Fr. Ronald Rolheiser in his book “The Passion and the Cross” writes, “God didn’t spare Jesus from suffering and death and Jesus doesn’t spare us from them… the cross and resurrection of Jesus reveal a redeeming, not a rescuing, God. (p39-40) We all fall into the trap too often of seeing God as an instrument of taking away all bad things, a God who will wipe away those who hurt and bother us, a God who destroys. What Fr. Rolheiser is reminding us is God is a God of relationship. A God who desires us to turn away from evil, violence, hatred and sin and to embrace a different path, a path of mercy and forgiveness.
“The best place to start is with God. What the cross tells us, more clearly than any other revelation, is that God is absolutely and utterly nonviolent and that God’s vulnerability, which the cross invites us into, is a power for community with God, and with each other. What’s being said here? How does the cross reveal God as nonviolent?” (p 35) Trying to answer those last two questions has been the Christian project for the past 2,000 years. How do I follow God? It is a reminder of how God invites us into a community. This is why coming together is so vitally important and the individualistic spiritualism of modern society is so harmful. Choosing to come together renews in us and reveals to us how God acts through the gifts of one another. In the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, the great saint reminds us, we are all called to be instruments of love living in the freedom of Christ-like obedience to the will of the God who is Love. Choosing to lead, guide and hope in love leads us away from coercion, force and vanity which the choosing to sin too often enslaves the souls of those Jesus has called to discipleship.
We are also reminded how this call to peace is rejected by the world of sin. It is, as Fr. Rolheiser writes, the throwing away, the discarding the abandoning of the most vulnerable and weak of society. “The crucified one is the stone rejected by the builders, the one deemed expendable so that normal life Will not be disrupted. But the crucified one is also God and there is a special intimacy with God that can be had only in standing, as did Mary and John, near the cross, in solidarity with the crucified one, the one who is being excluded.” (p. 41) Sometimes like, Mary and John, we are simply called to witness in silent love…but the witness must be present. It may look like the vigil of those praying outside an abortion facility, silent witnesses to the suffering and pain, the masking of the horrendous acts of violence against the innocent occurring within or it may look like the spouse quietly sharing the suffering of their dying loved one, holding a hand and caressing the soul with words and touch.
It is these acts of love where we come back to the understanding of how God has “redeemed” us and not “rescued” us from sin and death. It is in these acts of generous love where we discover the depth of our own enduring love which moves beyond passion and into the quietness of being with and the gentleness of obedient trust. The Cross reveals how forgiveness and reconciliation endure in love knowing the better within the other in our heart. “Sin is a betrayal of love. However, you first have to be loved and, however dimly, sense that love before you can betray it.” (p 44) Jesus in the silence of the Cross overcomes and frees us from betrayal and invites us once more to endure with him God’s gift of life in love.
The situations of violence and hatred we can believe are too great and too difficult to deal with so we will close our eyes to these crosses, to the Cross of Jesus but faith and love allow us to open our eyes and reveals the hopefulness of our cross united with Jesus’ Cross. “What the cross of Christ reveals is that when we are so paralyzed by fear and overcome by darkness that we can no longer help ourselves, when we have reached the stage where we can go longer open the door to let the light and life in, God can still come through our locked doors, stand inside our fear and paralysis, and breathe out peace.” (p 47)
Let us pray for men and women of good will this Easter season to embrace the cross of peace, the cross of justice, the cross of love.
God Bless
Fr. Mark