Good
Friday
John’s
proclamation of the Passion of Jesus is pretty stark. We don’t hear Jesus crying out in agony as in
some of the other gospel passages. Jesus
very straightforwardly goes to His death, His crucifixion and proclaims, “It is
finished.”
If
all we would do would be to dwell on the sufferings of Jesus, the terribleness
of the crucifixion, of the pain, of the hurt, of all the terrible agony that He
went through. And you can read Matthew’s, Mark’s and Luke’s passions and that will come out
very clearly. And if all we do is dwell on the physical suffering of Jesus which was terrible,
which was painful unto death, we miss why He did it.
He
could only endure such suffering because there was also so much more love as to
why He did it. There was that much
suffering, there was even more love behind it.
Because who would endure that kind of pain and hardship without a
reason. The challenge for you and for me
is to follow Jesus in His selfless love that even embraces the cross. To follow Jesus in His selfless that even
embraces the cross.
What
the passion reminds you and me is that everyone of us
one day will die. It reminds us of our
mortality, of our finitude, our limitlessness.
But Jesus embraced it lovingly.
He endured it, accepted it, so that you and I could take the crosses,
that ultimate cross of death and love it and then be raised as was Jesus.
So
tonight when you come forward to venerate the cross, take all of your crosses,
your pains, your hardships, your difficulties, your dyings,
your sins, your failings and put them on this cross of Jesus, knowing that
Jesus has taken them to Himself and lovingly carried them home to that embrace
of heaven so that our dyings, our crosses have
meaning and value. Of themselves they
are empty and so, so painful, but when we embrace the cross of Jesus we touch
love in it’s death and that makes all the
difference.
Our
challenge is to love as Jesus, even when it means the cross. Let our prayer be the prayer of Jesus,
“Father into Your hands I commend My spirit.”