Good Friday 2010

Homily for Good Friday 2 April 2010

Here we are gathered together on the saddest day in the Church’s year, the day of the death of Jesus, the day on which he mounted the Cross and died there. The Cross, so central to our Faith that it is the prime symbol of Christianity all over the world, the Cross which we shall come at the end of our Liturgy today to venerate with all our homage and our sorrow. We recall the various predictions that Jesus made –either openly or in hints to his closest companions- of his death, and the manner of it, and there is a saying of his about the Christian life in general that springs unbidden to the mind today: when Jesus says “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. (Mt 16:24) If we are to be true followers of Christ, then we too must go the way he has gone, and go to the cross – that is to say, we must first of all recognise what our cross is, because it will be a personal cross, particular to me, and then we must deal with it, deal with whatever it is in a way that is not the way of denial, nor the way of bitterness and resentment, but the way of acceptance, so that eventually by the mysterious chemistry that always occurs when good and evil meet, this acceptance and calm realism will bring to us and to those around us nothing but good, even the greatest good, which is our salvation.

The French thinker Jean Paul Sartre developed the philosophy called existentialism, which had such a vogue in my youth. He said other people try to tell us who we are, try to label us and define us, that is why “other people are hell” – whereas in fact we should do our utmost not to let them, not to let anybody else tell us who we are, only we, in some glorious isolation, decide who we are. Complete rubbish of course, because we are constantly from our birth on caught up in a thousand criss-crossing relations with other people that all have their effect on us, just as we too are having a thousand effects on them. Our dear Holy Father spoke about this inter-relation that we are all caught up in in his book on the four last things “Eschatology” back in the 80s: he says “the being of man is not that of a closed monad. It is related to others by love or hate, and in these ways it has colonies within them. My own being is present in others as guilt or as grace. We are not just ourselves….we are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love- this is part of our own destiny”. How does this fit in with the Cross? Because Jesus suffers on the Cross in his sacred humanity, which somehow capitulates within it the whole experience of all humanity, and consequently holds within himself all the momentum of evil that our hurts and hatreds, our vendettas and vindictiveness, have carried on creating throughout time. That is the burden of the Cross that he has to drag through the streets of the Holy City, that is the agony he has to endure, the myriad echoes within him of all our unresolved wrongs and wrongdoings that resonate ever louder down the ages. And it is there on the Cross, in his patient and willing accepting of all this, that Our Lord manages in a supreme cataclysm of love and forgiveness finally to halt all this in its tracks and to turn it round, to send it back on itself, in a new momentum of healing and forgiving, that will transform the whole mess of mankind’s sinning into a thousand new possibilities for love and for good. This is what the Psalmist means when he says (Ps 9:14) “You have seen the trouble and sorrow, you note it, you take it in hand”.
Long ago in the 5th century the saintly Bishop of Ravenna in Italy – Peter Chrysologus- compared Jesus on Good Friday going to the Cross to a farmer going out to his field, and taking with him the tool he will need to plough up the field and ensure that in due course there will be a harvest from it. Our own sins –my own flawed personality is in there too – have added to the burden and the agony, they are part of the field that needs to be tilled, but on the Cross it is all wiped out and done away with forever, the cumulative sin of all humanity and ours too, the field is worked over and made ready for its proper use, its yield. “It is accomplished” says Jesus as he dies, “consummatum est” or in the Greek one word “tetelestai”. Archaeologists have found a collection of wax tablets from a tax office from the time of Christ, and that is the word written on those accounts that have been paid off- finished, paid in full, as we might say today. It is finished, the tool of the Cross has done its work, and it only remains for us to take up our own cross and in so doing become the harvest that Jesus has toiled so hard for- to let go of the hurts people have inflicted on us and the hurts we have inflicted – our trespasses and those who trespass against us.- and to reverse in our own lives the momentum of evil and to allow his victory to cleanse us and make us whole. We are caught up forever with each other, and we are caught up forever with Our Lord, we live in the words of the Canon “through him, with him, in him”. Dear Jesus may we always live so that our fellow human beings see in us “the tokens of your love and mercy”, so that we live in them as grace and not as guilt, and let your dying words “It is finished” resonate forever in our hearts cancelling out all the harm and hurt that linger there. Amen.