Good Friday Reflection

I was troubled today as I walked the Way of the Cross in my dorm's chapel today. Going station to station with my little reflection book (done by John Kyler!), I could hear people yelling and swearing in the nearby stairwell and loud music pumping through the walls and ceiling of the building. Being fully aware of how the power of Jesus' person and actions still has yet to permeate the lives and faith of others and myself, the Stations remind me -- especially #12: Jesus dies on the cross -- that Jesus takes all of our imperfections and sins upon Himself, loving us first and always, even before we make our penitence and return to God (or come to Him for a first time).

The reflection I want to share comes from hearing the Gospel of the Lord's Passion from Matthew on Palm Sunday. I had one of those light-bulb moments that the Scriptures can so often occasion within us.

In the middle of lengthy narrative, Judas reappears with his band of police to arrest Jesus. One of Jesus' friends draws his sword and severs the ear of a soldier. Jesus rebukes him and delivers the famous line about living and dying by the sword. However, his next line is the one that hit me anew:

"Do you think that I cannot call upon my Father

and he will not provide me at this moment
with more than twelve legions of angels?
But then how would the Scriptures be fulfilled
which say that it must come to pass in this way?” (Matthew 25:53)

In a world and a life where we have access to God and His enduring love, we nonetheless screw up on a regular basis. We fall into old habits and negative patterns that we just can't seem to shake. Sometimes the simple reality that we can do something makes us think, even implicitly or subconsciously, that we should do it, or are at least allowed to do it.

This is an especially tough problem for those negative behaviors that happen behind closed doors, in our own privacy, or even in our minds and hearts. There is no enforcer and governing body inside us. We are left to our own conscience, our guilt, our hearts, to monitor ourselves. We use prayer and the Church and liturgy to find solidarity with others and remember the place that God can and should have in it all.

However, we are ultimately left to our own freedom -- this freedom that God gave us as a gift so that we would come to know His love through free embrace of it.

Let us look to the example of Christ: facing what He knew would be His brutal, painful death of torture and crucifixion, moments after praying that the cup pass Him by but deferring to God's will, Christ is faced with His arrest. Not only will His friends try to save Him -- advancing on Jesus' captors with violence -- but also, Christ knows He can use His power to call down the forces of heaven to save Him.

This is another time when Christ is giving us the perfect example. In the face of death, He resists the urge to do what He can to do what He must. He does not divert from His path of perfect freedom: He continues to align His will perfectly with the will of God. Rather than submit to selfish desires, He embraces the will of God that He offer Himself as the perfect sacrifice to expiate our sins and begin the most powerful display of love ever seen.

Here is the ideal that we strive after. We must resist those temptations to do whatever we are free to do. We must utilize our freedom to discern and follow God's will. Our free will is a gift from God. Rather than program us to follow His directions, God gives us the gift of freedom so that we might make our own free decision to love.

It all begins with the little decisions we make. Can we follow Christ's example and resist the opportunity to do things just because we can?

Here is the essay I wrote on Good Friday for a take-home exam for liturgy class. Some of it does deal with historical concerns, but I hope you'll give it a skim and find the power of Good Friday anew in some of what I put together for my essay response. May we hold the death of our Lord deep in our hearts...

The celebration of Good Friday is the result of an evolution of the liturgical observances of the Paschal events. As the understanding of Pascha evolved to emphasize the transitus or passage that occurs from death to life, the observance of Good Friday became more distinct and self-contained while still connected to the broader wholes of the Triduum and Lent. The baptismal theology of being initiated into Christ’s death and resurrection grew with the emergence of the Good Friday observance. Ultimately, Good Friday has become the Church’s day to meditate on the cross—a day without Eucharist that focuses believers on the revelation of the cross with a distinctive observance that commemorates the death of Jesus Christ.

The Gospels set the death of Jesus on different dates. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus dies on 15 Nisan, so for those accounts, the Last Supper, which occurs on 14 Nisan, is the Passover. In the Gospel of John, Jesus dies around the same time the lambs are slaughtered for Jewish Passover on 14 Nisan, the day of preparation (OFFS, 40); this makes Jesus the Lamb of God, the new sacrifice for all people. The Quartodeciman tradition within early Christianity celebrated the death of Jesus on 14 Nisan. These Christians would hold a vigil until midnight as 14 Nisan turned to 15 Nisan, keeping a fast until Christ would come again then celebrating the Eucharist (BMH, 114-115).

The significance of the Christian festal title of Pascha has been theologically unpacked throughout tradition. Talley identifies Nicea as a turning point—before it, Pascha was understood to mean passion and suffering (BMH, 101). Johnson and Bradshaw explain that thought shifted so that the emphasis was less on passion and more on passage or transitus, “from death to life” (OFFS, 60).

The changing understanding came from Alexandria; Clement cited Pascha as “humanity’s passage ‘from all trouble,’” and Origen explained that the Hebrew term invoked passage, as in the Exodus (OFFS, 60). Origen’s understanding also helped spread the Paschal Mystery out into its eventual three-day form, reaching back to the prophecy of Hosea (6:2 reads, “He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence.”) to identify Friday as His Passion, Saturday as His descent, and Sunday as His Resurrection (OFFS, 61). The clinging to passion-based understanding lingered for a few centuries, and the ideas came to fuse together, as seen in the words of Didymus of Alexandria: “we keep the Crossing-Feast…[o]n this day Christ has been sacrificed” (OFFS, 61-62).

The strength of Christ’s Passion also yielded strong baptismal theology, often connected to Romans 6 (see 6:3 for example: “Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”). Baptism gets connected to the Pascha and comes to mean baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ. Very early on in Rome, perhaps even from the beginnings of Christianity there, the celebration of Pascha highlighted how “the solemn administration of baptism becomes the great sacrament of the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord” (BMH, 107). The whole of the catechesis centers on eschatological expectation in the Resurrection, the celebration of the reality and profundity of salvation history, and the Passover or passage from captivity to freedom in the Passion of Jesus.

The origins of a clearer, more self-contained Good Friday are evident in the accounts of Egeria, the 4^th century pilgrim to Jerusalem. She writes that the Christians there exposed the true cross for veneration; the bishop would sit on a chair at Golgotha with the cross as pilgrims passed by to touch their heads to it and kiss it (OFFS, 63; BMH, 144). Usually, the Friday services in Jerusalem were at 3pm, but the Good Friday service started at noon with special readings until 3pm, when the readings switched to stories of Jesus’ burial. The fact that the Friday service was moved earlier to coincide with the timeline of Jesus’ Passion indicates that the Good Friday observance had taken on a special character, at least in Jerusalem, by this time.

It appears that Rome did not have clear elements of a distinct Good Friday observance until later. Gradually, a core of readings and psalms were assembled to go along with the Passion account from John’s Gospel. By the 7^th century, an imitative form of cross adoration modeled after Jerusalem devotion had taken root as well (OFFS, 65; BMH, 143). Relics of the true cross traveled around Europe from Jerusalem, and other churches gradually acquired their own small relics, which were displayed in larger crosses. Additionally, other Passion relics went from Jerusalem to other churches—the placard over Christ on the cross ended up in Rome, and the Holy Lance made its way to Constantinople.

The key to the evolution of Good Friday liturgy is that Eucharist is never consecrated on this day. The liturgical rite for this day is very simple and spare. The liturgy ends in silence, and the altar is stripped (Connell, II, 128). Only Penance and the Anointing of the Sick are celebrated on Good Friday and Holy Saturday while the bridegroom is away, for even the Church is fasting (Connell, II, 135). Some distribution of pre-consecrated Eucharist may occur. However, the central element of Good Friday is the cross, and on this day, the full sacramentality of the faith is focused on the cross.

Good Friday as a whole went from simply being “a preparatory feast [for Pascha] to a commemoration of his death” (OFFS, 60). In the late fourth century, the Church saw the “emergence of the liturgical observance as the memorial of Christ’s death” (OFFS, 62). This moves the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection to the Sunday liturgy. The center of Good Friday devotion and piety became the cross. The crucial distinction in practice is that the Church venerates the wood, the tree, the instrument of torture and death that Christ transformed with His Passion. The crucifix should be put aside for these days while Christ is buried and descended—“the object to be venerated on this day is not a crucifix [i.e., a cross with the body of Jesus on it]… but rather a relic of the true cross or at least a cross” (BMH, 143).

The directives of the Roman rites reflect the centrality and magnitude of the cross vividly: “The cross is here treated as the revelation of God” (BMH, 147). The Church today preserves the custom dating back at least to 4^th century Jerusalem of genuflecting and adoring the cross (BMH, 147). The centrality of the cross to the Good Friday devotion and liturgy helps believers tap into the depths of meaning associated with the tree on which their hope is hung. The cross is the “instrument of redemption” through which Christ made the perfect sacrifice, formerly a cruel tool of punishment but now “the royal throne from which divine presence reigns,” and a “sign of the Lord’s eschatological presence,” a part of the Paschal Mystery that Christ has died, has risen, and will come again (BMH, 150-151).

Ultimately, the whole of Jesus’ death and the Church’s veneration of His cross brings believers back to the redemption won by Christ in His Passion. “As the wood of the cross appears to sight, it prompts the narration of how Christ in the fullness of time assumed our flesh and redeemed mankind by his death on the tree, thereby restoring creation by means of the very material which caused its fall” (BMH, 148). Humanity fell by the fruit of a tree, and through Jesus’ Passion and His tree, humanity was redeemed and restored: “no forest ever yielded its equal in leaf, flower, and fruit” (BMH, 148).

Our Perfectly Benevolent God

I submit to you all a humble, garbled reflection on confronting the hardships allowed in our lives...

Last week, I read A Grief Observed by CS Lewis, his personal reflection on the emotional journey he walked while mourning the passing of his late-in-life wife, Joy. Lewis hopes not to provide a philosophically foolproof argument on anything about pain or suffering but rather present his own experience of dealing with the loss of his beloved.

Lewis' thoughts are the honest words of a man who feels beaten up and beleaguered. And amid the roughness, he provides a wonderful insight on the nature of this God of ours.

So many times people question how God can let bad things happen to good people or even let bad things happen at all. The gut response is that "things happen for a reason." While this isn't entirely wrong, it isn't the best way to respond to the problem. Check out this passage of Lewis that struck me leading into Holy Week and its special invitation to penitence and reconciliation:

"The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable that a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed--might grow tired of his vile sport--might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't." (From A Grief Observed, p. 674-675 in The Complete CS Lewis Signature Classics)

Forgive me if I take Lewis' words pretty much at face value without dissecting the philosophy and argument of it all... The way I have come to understand this reality of pain and evil in the world is that God can find good in ANYTHING. God is the omnipotent, all-knowing Creator of this world, of us, of everything.

My belief in God says that God can and will find good in anything. I think that the things we understand to be "bad" or negative or unattractive are just opportunities for God to prove the profundity of His love -- i.e., using the weak to shame the strong, etc.

So, too, with our crosses: those difficult negative patterns of behavior, speech, and thought that plague our lives and consciences are opportunities for God to show us His love. We may question the wisdom of the specific hardships that arise, especially death, sudden tragedy, natural disasters to name a few. However, we must recall that our God is the perfectly benevolent surgeon that only gives us what we can handle, what we can go through in order to come out stronger, wholler, more aware of His love.

The process may suck, a lot. But it is up to us to remember that God is present all the while (call to mind the Footprints poem that demonstrates Christ's companionship so beautifully!). We simply must harness the power of prayer to remember the unwavering love of God that is with us all the while and find our strength there.

So in this time of penitence, let us reflect upon these truths of God:

1. God gives us, or allows us, only experiences that we can handle (with Him!)

2. God is perfectly benevolent.

3. God never abandons us.

Let our examinations of conscience be honest and thorough as we bring our sins before God in the sacrament of reconciliation to access the grace and forgiveness of Christ won through His perfect sacrifice on the cross.

In the Shadow of His Cross

For Feasts and Seasons class today, we were asked to have read An Adult Christ at Christmas by Raymond Brown. As a senior coasting to graduation, I read about half of the 50-page essay, not out of lack of interest but dwindling focus and will power. What I did read was fascinating, and this is not of those assignments that will fall by the wayside just because the due date has passed.

The main thrust of the book, or so I'm told by Prof. Johnson, is seeking to keep the Adult Christ--the preaching, healing, Passion and satisfaction-making, Risen Christ--focal in our celebration of Christmas. We've talked in class about the Christological controversies and development of doctrine that shape all of this.

Brown traces the lineage of the Gospel narratives and how they deepen and broaden our understanding of the eminence of Christ. Mark, the first Gospel, makes Baptism into the first big Sonship moment. As the tradition developed and the nature of who Jesus was became better understood and believed, Luke's and Matthew's Gospels included infancy narratives to show that Jesus was Son of God from the start. Then, finally, we get John and His magnificent prologue on Jesus and God and Son from the beginning of everything.

So what do we do with all of this in our modern, commercialized, baby-Jesus-centric Christmas celebration. Or, as Nick asked Prof. Johnson, how do we catechize this message to each other when the creche and Nativity scene are right next to the altar?

The answer was right before us in a painting Prof. Johnson shared with us. The painting was a standardly beautiful depiction of Mary and Joseph bent over the manger with baby Jesus, cherubs floating above in angelic adoration of Christ. The irony of this painting was the answer: the artist had included a crucifix in the shadows on the wall beside the Holy Family.

After chuckling about a crucifix on the wall thirty years before Christ would take up His cross, after laughing off the overt Catholicism of the scene, the answer lies right in front of our noses. Everything about Christmas occurs in the shadow of the cross. Everything comes back to the cross, to the Passion of Christ, to His Resurrection, to the victory over death He wrought for us.

Our celebration of the birth of Jesus--"Today is born our Savior!"--is entirely founded on the whole mystery of Christ--dying, rising, coming again. It all started with birth, but it is a birth that was and is oriented toward the salvation of humanity.

So eat up that irony and remember that everything about Christmas, and everything about our faith and our worship and belief in Jesus, happens in the shadow of the Cross and the light of its God.

The Good of God

One of the really positive results of the classroom prep for Vision last year was Janice Poorman's criticism of "Everything happens for a reason." My older brother had introduced me to some of the pitfalls of this cliche, and over time, I began to realize there are better ways to communicate that sentiment.

Between losing my computer harddrive and some of its precious content, a break-up that weighed on me more than it should have, and plenty of other things, I have learned how good can come of basically anything.

God is omnipotent and all-powerful, having made everything that is. So why in the world would He not be able to make good come from anything that could possibly happen in this world? God does not delight in what we would call "bad things" happening, but He certainly does not give up on anything or anyone.

The challenge for us is to not become overly connected to our definitions of good and bad and to remember that God can and will find good in everything. We must aim to consider how God will do that. We must try to meet Him in the good, embracing and enjoying the light that God shines for us and with us.

If my words seem jumbled and unclear, let's go to the Sunday Gospel that revived this thread in my mind. After seeing a man blind from death, Jesus is asked if the man's blindness is caused by his sin or the sins of his parents. Jesus answers, “Neither he nor his parents sinned;

it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him."

The apparent hardship and evil we encounter are not acceptable or right. However, they are opportunities for the grace and love of God to overpower that evil and illuminate and highlight the good of God and that Love that is everything.