Good Friday, April 15, 2022
/Jesus completes his mission on this earth
John 18:1—19:42
Chapter 18
1.After he had said all this, Jesus left with his disciples and crossed the Kidron valley where there was a garden into which he went with his disciples. 2.Judas the traitor knew the place also, since Jesus had often met his disciples there, 3.so Judas brought the cohort to this place together with guards sent by the chief priests and the Pharisees, all with lanterns and torches and weapons. 4.Knowing everything that was to happen to him, Jesus came forward and said, 'Who are you looking for?' 5.They answered, 'Jesus the Nazarene.' He said, 'I am he.' Now Judas the traitor was standing among them. 6.When Jesus said to them, 'I am he,' they moved back and fell on the ground. 7.He asked them a second time, 'Who are you looking for?' They said, 'Jesus the Nazarene.' 8.Jesus replied, 'I have told you that I am he. If I am the one you are looking for, let these others go.' 9.This was to fulfil the words he had spoken, 'Not one of those you gave me have I lost.' 10.Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it and struck the high priest's servant, cutting off his right ear. The servant's name was Malchus. 11.Jesus said to Peter, 'Put your sword back in its scabbard; am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?' 12.The cohort and its tribune and the Jewish guards seized Jesus and bound him.
13.They took him first to Annas, because Annas was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was high priest that year. 14.It was Caiaphas who had counselled the Jews, 'It is better for one man to die for the people.' 15.Simon Peter, with another disciple, followed Jesus. This disciple, who was known to the high priest, went with Jesus into the high priest's palace, 16.but Peter stayed outside the door. So the other disciple, the one known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the door-keeper and brought Peter in. 17.The girl on duty at the door said to Peter, 'Aren't you another of that man's disciples?' He answered, 'I am not.' 18.Now it was cold, and the servants and guards had lit a charcoal fire and were standing there warming themselves; so Peter stood there too, warming himself with the others. 19.The high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching. 20.Jesus answered, 'I have spoken openly for all the world to hear; I have always taught in the synagogue and in the Temple where all the Jews meet together; I have said nothing in secret. 21.Why ask me? Ask my hearers what I taught; they know what I said.' 22.At these words, one of the guards standing by gave Jesus a slap in the face, saying, 'Is that the way you answer the high priest?' 23.Jesus replied, 'If there is some offence in what I said, point it out; but if not, why do you strike me?' 24.Then Annas sent him, bound, to Caiaphas the high priest. 25.As Simon Peter stood there warming himself, someone said to him, 'Aren't you another of his disciples?' He denied it saying, 'I am not.' 26.One of the high priest's servants, a relation of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, said, 'Didn't I see you in the garden with him?' 27.Again Peter denied it; and at once a cock crowed.
28.They then led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the Praetorium. It was now morning. They did not go into the Praetorium themselves to avoid becoming defiled and unable to eat the Passover. 29.So Pilate came outside to them and said, 'What charge do you bring against this man?' They replied, 30.'If he were not a criminal, we should not have handed him over to you.' 31.Pilate said, 'Take him yourselves, and try him by your own Law.' The Jews answered, 'We are not allowed to put anyone to death.' 32.This was to fulfil the words Jesus had spoken indicating the way he was going to die. 33.So Pilate went back into the Praetorium and called Jesus to him and asked him, 'Are you the king of the Jews?' 34.Jesus replied, 'Do you ask this of your own accord, or have others said it to you about me?' 35.Pilate answered, 'Am I a Jew? It is your own people and the chief priests who have handed you over to me: what have you done?' 36.Jesus replied, 'Mine is not a kingdom of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my men would have fought to prevent my being surrendered to the Jews. As it is, my kingdom does not belong here.' 37.Pilate said, 'So, then you are a king?' Jesus answered, 'It is you who say that I am a king. I was born for this, I came into the world for this, to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.' 38.'Truth?' said Pilate. 'What is that?' And so saying he went out again to the Jews and said, 'I find no case against him. 39.But according to a custom of yours I should release one prisoner at the Passover; would you like me, then, to release for you the king of the Jews?' 40.At this they shouted, 'Not this man,' they said, 'but Barabbas.' Barabbas was a bandit."
Chapter 19
"1.Pilate then had Jesus taken away and scourged; 2.and after this, the soldiers twisted some thorns into a crown and put it on his head and dressed him in a purple robe. 3.They kept coming up to him and saying, 'Hail, king of the Jews!' and slapping him in the face. 4.Pilate came outside again and said to them, 'Look, I am going to bring him out to you to let you see that I find no case against him.' 5.Jesus then came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said, 'Here is the man.' 6.When they saw him, the chief priests and the guards shouted, 'Crucify him! Crucify him!' Pilate said, 'Take him yourselves and crucify him: I find no case against him.' 7.The Jews replied, 'We have a Law, and according to that Law he ought to be put to death, because he has claimed to be Son of God.' 8.When Pilate heard them say this his fears increased. 9.Re-entering the Praetorium, he said to Jesus, 'Where do you come from?' But Jesus made no answer. 10.Pilate then said to him, 'Are you refusing to speak to me? Surely you know I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?' 11.Jesus replied, 'You would have no power over me at all if it had not been given you from above; that is why the man who handed me over to you has the greater guilt.' 12.From that moment Pilate was anxious to set him free, but the Jews shouted, 'If you set him free you are no friend of Caesar's; anyone who makes himself king is defying Caesar.' 13.Hearing these words, Pilate had Jesus brought out, and seated him on the chair of judgement at a place called the Pavement, in Hebrew Gabbatha. 14.It was the Day of Preparation, about the sixth hour. 'Here is your king,' said Pilate to the Jews. 15.But they shouted, 'Away with him, away with him, crucify him.' Pilate said, 'Shall I crucify your king?' The chief priests answered, 'We have no king except Caesar.' 16.So at that Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified.
They then took charge of Jesus, 17.and carrying his own cross he went out to the Place of the Skull or, as it is called in Hebrew, Golgotha, 18.where they crucified him with two others, one on either side, Jesus being in the middle. 19.Pilate wrote out a notice and had it fixed to the cross; it ran: 'Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews'. 20.This notice was read by many of the Jews, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the writing was in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. 21.So the Jewish chief priests said to Pilate, 'You should not write "King of the Jews", but that the man said, "I am King of the Jews". ' 22.Pilate answered, 'What I have written, I have written.'
23.When the soldiers had finished crucifying Jesus they took his clothing and divided it into four shares, one for each soldier. His undergarment was seamless, woven in one piece from neck to hem; 24.so they said to one another, 'Instead of tearing it, let's throw dice to decide who is to have it.' In this way the words of scripture were fulfilled: They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothes. That is what the soldiers did. 25.Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. 26.Seeing his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near her, Jesus said to his mother, 'Woman, this is your son.' 27.Then to the disciple he said, 'This is your mother.' And from that hour the disciple took her into his home. 28.After this, Jesus knew that everything had now been completed and, so that the scripture should be completely fulfilled, he said: I am thirsty. 29.A jar full of sour wine stood there; so, putting a sponge soaked in the wine on a hyssop stick, they held it up to his mouth. 30.After Jesus had taken the wine he said, 'It is fulfilled'; and bowing his head he gave up his spirit. 31.It was the Day of Preparation, and to avoid the bodies' remaining on the cross during the Sabbath -- since that Sabbath was a day of special solemnity -- the Jews asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken away. 32.Consequently the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with him and then of the other. 33.When they came to Jesus, they saw he was already dead, and so instead of breaking his legs 34.one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance; and immediately there came out blood and water.
35.This is the evidence of one who saw it -- true evidence, and he knows that what he says is true -- and he gives it so that you may believe as well. 36.Because all this happened to fulfil the words of scripture: Not one bone of his will be broken; 37.and again, in another place scripture says: They will look to the one whom they have pierced.
38.After this, Joseph of Arimathaea, who was a disciple of Jesus -- though a secret one because he was afraid of the Jews -- asked Pilate to let him remove the body of Jesus. Pilate gave permission, so they came and took it away. 39.Nicodemus came as well -- the same one who had first come to Jesus at night-time -- and he brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. 40.They took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, following the Jewish burial custom. 41.At the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried. 42.Since it was the Jewish Day of Preparation and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there."
Companions for the Journey:
HOMILY FOR GOOD FRIDAY DEIVERED AT UNIVERSITY PUBLIC WORSHIP, MEMORIAL CHURCH 2008 Nancy Greenfield
The last words of Jesus, according to the writer of the last canonical Gospel, were the cryptic: "It is finished".
What is finished?
I think it depends on your perspective.
Let us, in our mind's eye, gather around the cross and observe the reactions of those intimately connected to the fateful events of that day:
For the High priests, this is the end, or so they think, to all those incendiary speeches, dangerous gatherings of people who are beginning to question the authority of the temple, and who are beginning to see the high priests as collaborators in a system which kept the peace with Rome, but did so on the backs of the poor and marginalized. It is an end to a public relations nightmare in which Rome once again looks at this corner of the world as a hotbed of discontent and sedition. The traitor is dead.
It is finished; FINALLY!
Soldiers on a hill, obeying orders from above. Nasty job to pull. But somebody has to. Wretched day. Hot. Humid. Cloudy. Storm brewing. Anybody for a quick game? Thirsty! Listen to that one. He's thirsty! If you are the king of the Jews, get out of this one — if you can. A bad job; but it's over now. Another day, another shekel. (1.) It is finished:
Two thieves, each with a different reaction on their last day on earth: One is desperate for life, disappointed when Jesus can't pull off the final miracle. "I knew you were a fake!" The other, sensing something larger than life is happening here: "This man has done nothing wrong." But for each of them, there is no coming down from that cross alive.
It is finished.
The crowd dwindles. The shouting subsides. Wagging their heads they snort and chuckle. Destroy the temple! Who did he think he was? Rebuild it in three days! He fancied himself at playing Solomon. Good riddance, I say. That was a good one.
But it's finished now.
Somewhere in the shadows lurks a free man. Released from prison his first day out of jail. Barabbas delivered from bondage! His term of sentence?
It is finished.
Off in the distance on the palace balcony stand Pilate and his wife. A nightmare come true, but after all — I didn’t really know him. It wasn’t as though he were somebody important. What's done is done. " What I have written I have written," And that's that.
It is finished (2.)
The disciples--men and women, many of whom have been expecting a radical change in the religious philosophies and the social structures at the hand of Jesus surely realize that it is finished, and not in a good way, on that fateful afternoon when Jesus dies. "I left my family, my good life as a fisherman to follow him. I thought we had every chance of success. I was going to be his right hand person in his new kingdom. He is the only one who understood everything I ever did. What now? I guess it's back to the job of trying to make a living fishing. That 's it. We failed.
It is finished." (3)
What is finished?
When I was a child, I heard over and over again in one version or another: Jesus' job, to die for our sins, is finished. Jesus had to die in order for humanity to be restored to God's favor. Jesus' death settled the debt we owed by sinning, and opened up the gates of heaven for us once more. When Jesus' death is understood in light of salvation spirituality, his was a necessary sacrifice for all mankind. The reasoning, according to St Anselm in 1097, goes something like this: the human race has sinned, from Adam on down, and all crime must have punishment. Therefore, God must require a punishment, a price, before God can forgive our sins or crimes. God's anger will only be appeased by human sacrifice. This human sacrifice must be unblemished and perfect, so no one other than Jesus, the God-Man will be adequate. Jesus died for my sins. The payment has been made, the debt has been satisfied. (4.) Jesus came to save us. And that job is finished.
Sorry folks, I just don't buy it. For many of us, both in and out of the Christian communion, this notion of substitutionary atonement is more of a stumbling block than a help. For many of us, this reasoning flies in the face of our understanding of God as Abba, a loving daddy. What parent would demand the death of a son or daughter as payment for disobedience? Not a normal one.
Oh yes, Jesus came to save us, but not in the way we expected
Jesus became human to show us how to save ourselves from ourselves. He came to give us a vision of how life could be if it were ordered according to the principles of God instead of principles of humans. Jesus came to show us how to love. How to heal, and how to forgive. And this is what he did from one dusty corner of Israel to other. This is what he preached when he spoke of the laborers in the vineyard, or the Prodigal Son. This is what he did when he refused to counter violence with violence in his last hours on this earth. The legacy Jesus left is there for all of us to recall, recounted every time we pick up a gospel reading. . Too often we look on Jesus' death as a one-time solution to all that ails the earth. Too often we pray to God for an end to war, or poverty or injustice, expecting God to make it happen without any change or effort on our part. God has chosen since the beginning of time, to work in and through humans, and if the kingdom of heaven is to be attained, it must be through our own efforts, using the words and works of Jesus as a lodestar.
And when he died on that dark and dreadful day, his part in the drama we call the History of the Earth was over. It was finished. God or no God, by becoming fully human, one in solidarity with all of humanity, it was ordained that he would die--and the manner of his dying showed those who suffer: "I will suffer with you." He had done all he could to leave behind a legacy of love and mission. Unfortunately, the world Jesus left behind is a broken, messy world, riddled with sin and selfishness, and the project of healing is an interactive one between God and us. It is our job to do our part to finish what Jesus started.
And it that sense, it is not finished.
Look around folks.
We got trouble, right here in River City.
Right here on our small planet, we are busy killing one another and have been doing so since the days of Cain and Abel. When we speak of war casualties, --which in this war, numbers 4300 and counting- we rarely count the losses to our "enemy". When we speak of deterrents, we don't always stop to consider that our little planet has enough weapons of mass destruction stockpiled to annihilate every person on this earth. On our small planet, we are punching holes in the ozone layer, polluting the oceans with oil spills and ruining rivers and streams with industrial waste. Some animals, driven out of their habitat by encroaching civilization and industrialization, starve or are killed for profit. Currently, there are over 1000 species of birds and mammals that are facing extinction. And let us not forget that the collateral damage of war is the scorching of Mother earth itself.
IT IS NOT FINISHED!
Right here in this land of the free, last time I looked, bigotry and prejudice were alive and well. Stories of discrimination and hate crimes against Blacks, Asians, gays, women, Jews, Muslims; against "those people" who are not like us--these stories are in the newspaper and on the daily news every day. Every day!
Right here in this prosperous country, the younger you are, the more vulnerable you are. Among industrialized countries, America is the first in military technology, in military exports, in defense expenditures, in millionaires and billionaires, in health technology, but 17th in efforts to lift children out of poverty, 18th in infant mortality, last in protecting our children against gun violence. As our country has grown richer, our children have grown poorer. (5.)
Every 40 seconds a child is born into poverty. Every minute a child is born without health insurance. Every three minutes a child is arrested for drug abuse. Every six minutes a child is arrested for a violent crime. Every eighteen minutes a baby dies. Every two hours a firearm kills a child or youth.
Every day in America 8189 children are reported abused or neglected. (6.)
Every day.
IS SO NOT FINISHED!
Right here in our own small town, today and tomorrow people are surging or sending surrogates into the grocery stores to provision for the Easter feast as if it were the last banquet. As we exit the stores we don't even see the people sitting outside on an upended box with crudely lettered cardboard signs saying: "Homeless. Out of Work. Please help." As darkness closes in, small groups of desperate people arrange their meager bundles for another night in the open. The homeless shelters are full, the lines at St. Anthony's get longer and longer. Right here in our small town, many of the elderly have to make a choice between food and medication, between food and heat. Right here.
IT IS NOT FINISHED!
And we pray to God to fix it.
"Please God, give us peace. Stop people from fighting with us. Please God, stop people from polluting the earth. Please God, end discrimination and poverty and safeguard the most vulnerable. "
I ask you, is this the best we can do to love one another as Jesus has loved us? I think we can do better.
Jesus is no longer with us, and in the words of St Theresa of Avila: " God has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on the world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the earth. "
Instead, Let us pray to God to fix us:
Jesus, Man of Peace,
Give us the wisdom to look beyond military power and brute force to see that the collateral damage of war is often the life of an innocent child, or somebody's mother or hundreds and thousands of homeless and dislocated souls living in refugee camps.
Lord of Consolation,
I want to see with loving eyes all those lonely and hopeless
ones who have no one to talk to, who are locked in their own misery, who are too old to matter to anyone any more. Give me eyes of compassion to look at the faces behind the faces that I meet every day. Help me to see as fellow travelers those tucked into homes lighted for the evening, and in the homeless who arrange their bundles at the end of the day. Give me ears to hear the voices of the needy and the non-voices of silent desperation. Help me to have the courage and the energy to spend something of myself on their behalf Give me a heart that cares and words to heal.
Jesus, brother and friend, you left us an awesome and difficult task--It is not finished.
I am not finished.
I have barely begun.
1. adapted from God Has A Story Too by James A. Sanders, Elizabeth Hay Bechtel Professor of Intertestamental and Biblical Studies at the School of Theology, Claremont, California, and Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate School. He is also the author of Torah and Canon.. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Paul Mobley. God Has A Story Too was published in 1979 by Fortress Press, Philadelphia
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Crossan, John Dominic and Borg, Marcus: The Last Week, p139
5. Walter Burghardt: To Be Just is to Love, 190
6. Ibid
Exaltation of the Cross
Sept. 14, 2008
Catherine Wolff
My early school days were spent at St. Agnes Grammar School up in San Francisco. I’m old enough that seeing a movie was a major treat in those days, and the nuns who ran St. Agnes must have invested all their savings in the one movie we had in our library – a Spanish film that came out in the mid-1950’s called The Miracle of Marcellino.
My memory of the exact plot is a bit sketchy –Marcellino was a poor little orphan who had been taken in by the monks in a very austere monastery, and there was an episode having to do with a scorpion bite, and a miracle involving bread and wine. But I do have vivid, enduring memories of the conversations that Marcellino would have with Jesus. He was a lonely little boy who visited the chapel regularly to pray out loud in front of a crucifix that seemed to be at least 15 feet tall. After awhile Jesus, from way up on the cross, started talking back in a deep, rich, sorrowful voice. It was a great comfort to Marcellino but it was absolutely terrifying to me as a 6 or 7-year-old. I was worried that any number of crucifixes that hung all over Catholic 1950’s San Francisco would start speaking to me, but really what was most disturbing was that Jesus was somehow still hanging on the cross, now, today.
Now this was in the days just before Vatican II, when there was still considerable emphasis on the cross as ransom for sin, and on our personal and collective culpability in Jesus’ suffering and death. The story of the cross was told in terms of the sacrifice necessary for the redemption of our sins, one that we find in the Synoptic Gospels. This was a story that implied that God was deeply offended, that he required appeasement, recompense, and that since no mere human could make up for the estrangement that we humans had chosen, God had to send His own son to make amends, and to require of Him the ultimate sacrifice of death.
But there is another way to understand the cross. If we consider God’s love to be the real basis for hope, instead of the terrible ransom of Jesus’ life, we can tell another version of the story. It starts with creation itself, where God begins to reveal Himself, freely and forgivingly, as we see in today’s first reading about his care for his hungry and confused people wandering in the desert. And in this story creation is not an event that is contained in the past but is actually ongoing in history, ongoing in our hearts.
The next phase in this unfolding revelation of God’s love is the Incarnation. This is not a desperate salvage job, where God has to intervene in human history to help set it right. We already see him intervening continuously throughout the Old Testament, through the covenant which He kept so lovingly and faithfully and His People kept so badly.
The Incarnation is God breaking directly, physically, into history in human form in the person of Jesus. In fact, the great Franciscan Duns Scotus made a powerful argument that the Incarnation is God’s primary redemptive act. He said that the Incarnation was first and foremost in God’s mind from the beginning. It could not have been dependent on, or occasioned by, any action of humans, especially sin.
The language of John’s Gospel, which we hear today, does not stress Jesus’ death as ransom, sacrifice, atonement, as the Synoptic Gospels do. In John and Ephesians, in Duns Scotus and Karl Rahner, the crucifixion is part of Jesus’ glorification, not only a sacrifice but a manifestation of the lengths to which God is willing to go to bring us closer to him.
All of Jesus’ work was redemptive, all of it ennobled our human nature he took on for us -- his healing, his teaching, and as we heard from Paul today, his obedience unto death, even death on a cross. Jesus was a prophet in a long tradition that believed in the power of suffering to atone for wrongdoing, and because he was so faithful to God’s will, he come to understand that he was to die, and that his death was a sacrifice for others.
Jesus resolutely accepted his fate, and his faithfulness persisted throughout his terrible suffering and into his death. But so did the Father’s outpouring of love. We know that because Jesus was raised from the dead, and we are given new life in the Kingdom that came about as a result.
And yet that Kingdom is often so difficult to realize. We still suffer. You do, I do. I think of my long walk with my brother down the road to his death from brain cancer. I think of my friend Mary who has carried her schizophrenic brother for twenty years now. I wonder where so many Katrina victims are – they never came home again. And when I see pictures of children in Darfur it seems as though much of humankind is still nailed to a cross.
How can we find hope in our suffering, in the suffering of Jesus on the cross? How can we come to comprehend the reality that the cross contains not only the suffering but also the incarnation and the exaltation of Jesus? That it contains not only failure and scandal and pain but also victory and the promise of eternal life? Jesus already triumphed, and yet you and I here today are not yet capable of living fully in the Kingdom he established.
We are more like the Hebrews wandering around in the desert, complaining about wretched food and ravaged by serpents. In the rather mysterious passage we heard earlier, Moses had to appeal to God who told him to make an image of the serpent, mount it on a pole, and to have everybody who had been bitten look at it, and as a result, actually live. God had his people confront that which terrified them, and in doing so they were healed.
In fact, Jesus recalls that very event in the gospel we heard today -- He tells us that as Moses raised up the serpent for his people, the Son of Man is also lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. The Son of Man lifted up on the cross is a dreadful sight to see. It requires us to confront not only Jesus’ suffering but our own demons, and our own suffering borne in His body.
This is a powerful lesson of the cross – that we cannot turn away from suffering. We must assume our crosses as faithfully as Jesus did; we must suffer in order to be healed. In being healed we will be able to accept Jesus’ reassurance that the cross is the occasion for the great manifestation of God’s love for us, not a condemnation of the world but a promise that the world is saved.
HOMILY FOR GOOD FRIDAY ECUMENICAL SERVICE MEMORIAL CHURCH 2018
John Kerrigan
What would be a crucifixion for me? To feel that I’m absolutely alone, that nobody cared for or wanted me, that it really didn’t matter to anyone whether I lived or died.
About five years ago, I received an email from a former work acquaintance. Her name was Alice and she lived on the east coast. Alice’s note had a frantic tone to it: her son, Chris, enrolled in college in the Bay Area, was failing out of school. Furthermore, he had refused to meet with his academic advisor and stopped attending his therapy sessions. Alice asked if I would meet with Chris; I readily agreed. I sent her son a brief text introducing myself. His reply was hardly encouraging. “What do you want from me?” he wrote. After a few more emails back and forth, he agreed to meet. In my first face-to-face encounter with Chris, I sensed that he was exceptionally paranoid and obscenely angry. Think for a moment about J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in "Catcher in the Rye" and, then, multiply that character’s cynicism by ten and you’ll start to get a picture of Chris. As we spoke, I quickly learned about his former friends, former girlfriend, and former stellar grades. I also learned about his current struggle with the prescription drug Adderall. Over time, I realized that Chris was experiencing the crucifixion of feeling entirely alone. In his mind, no one cared about him; he also had convinced himself that he could care less about anyone else.During the course of subsequent meetings, I simply listened to Chris and allowed him to vent. Ultimately, he decided to withdraw from school and move back east, primarily for economic reasons. I saw Chris for the last time a few days before his departure and helped him move some boxes from his apartment to a place where they could be shipped back east. As I was about to leave, I handed Chris a hat from the Stanford golf course (just like this one), and told him that it might come in handy as he coped with the summer heat back home. As we said our goodbyes, Chris casually handed the hat back to me. I was confused and said, "Chris, this is a gift; it’s yours to keep." He seemed genuinely surprised and said, “I thought you were joking. You mean I can keep it?" Whereupon, he put it on, and with a grin, said "thank you". It was the first time that I had heard him speak those two words.
Now, why do I share the story with you? For two reasons, actually.
First, because it reminds you and me that Calvary is not just a place nor is it a moment in time. Calvary comes to life whenever and wherever the body of Christ is scourged, stripped, broken, pierced. There is the Calvary of war and bigotry, the Calvary of persecution and poverty. There is the Calvary that dwells in every human heart, whenever we turn toward sin and away from Christ. There is the Calvary of young Chris being bound by the chains of despair and self- loathing. The miracle of Good Friday, though, is the realization that by God's grace, Calvary isn't the end of the story.
Second, I share the story about Chris so that we can spend a moment reflecting on the meaning of a "gift." Gifts are something that are given freely. They can, however, be received or ignored by the person for whom they are intended. Chris’s outer shell was pretty hard; he had a difficulty receiving and accepting a gift, though he did eventually embrace my gesture of friendship. It takes a certain humility to accept a gift and, more so, to accept that it is given freely by someone who thinks enough of us to give us that gift. This Good Friday we need to ask ourselves, “Are we willing to accept the gift of God’s unconditional love in our lives? Are you and I willing to stop making excuses for who we are and accept the fact that the person that God’s loves is the person that God made, you and me, just the way that we are?”
For a moment, let’s also ask ourselves, “Why do we call this Friday "Good?” Perhaps, because God used it to remind you and me that our humanity was something precious. After all, Jesus took on our flesh, he was born in the same way that you and I were born. I have no doubt that God could have worked out our salvation in many different ways. Instead, God decided to save us by taking on our flesh and pitching a tent among us. God became one of us because God wanted to experience what we experience and in the same way that we experience it. Recall for a moment, Paul's letter to the Hebrews: "We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin."
If you and I want to know the meaning of the word God, we need only look at the life, death and destiny of Jesus of Nazareth. Likewise, if you or I want to know what it means to be a human being, we need look no farther than Jesus of Nazareth. The fullness of humanity revealing the fullness of divinity is found in the gift of Jesus of Nazareth. Which brings us back to God's "gift" this somber day. In all of his ministry, through to the Last Supper and passion and death on a cross, Jesus is saying to us, ‘If you want to hold on to your life, if you try to preserve it, if you grasp it and will not let it go, you will lose it. But, if you give your life away, if you hand it over, if you are willing to die, you will discover that you cannot run out of life.’ Hold onto life, you lose it; give it away and life becomes everlasting.
Good Friday reminds you and me that we will lose what we hold onto and can never run out of what we freely give away. Let’s apply this principle to our education and work lives as well. You and I may believe that our schooling and careers are gifts given to us to be grasped, prizes that we have achieved and strive to hold on to so as to advance in our professions or to make more money and provide for our family. And, actually, these are fine outcomes. However, if we think that these outcomes are all that our education and work lives are about, then perhaps we are unworthy of both. For the real reason for our education and life of work is to give us a greater ability to serve others. We never truly grasp the full fruits of our education and work until we give them away to others. The measure of our success is the degree to which people who never came to Stanford or set foot in Silicon Valley experience lives that are richer, fuller, more genuinely human because you did go to Stanford or you do work in Silicon Valley.
On Good Friday, Jesus gave everything, until there was nothing left to give – "Father, I hand myself over to you. It is finished.” To be able to give away everything is what all of us are in training to do, from the moment of our baptism. And in doing so, becoming a little more human. And in becoming a little more human, we become genuinely holy.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with Chris and his mother. Though the road’s been bumpy, he's navigating life much better. But, to one degree or another, isn’t life a bumpy road for you and me also. Alice did tell me, though, that the hat that I gave him as a token of our brief friendship is now threadbare from wear; that fact pleased me greatly.
Thanks to the gift of the Incarnation, you, I and God have one thing in common— we’re all human. Therefore, if we wish to be like God, let’s set our minds and hearts on being more human. And the way to be more human is to help others to be more human. To give yourself away.To discover that fact is to discover everything that is important in the Christian tradition. That is the gift that has been given to us this day. Give it away!
Reflections and Meditations:
A Meditation in the Augustinian Style/Relationship:
The Way of the Cross, (adapted from Surrender: A Guide for Prayer by Jacqueline Syrup Bergan and Sister Marie Schwann, which is volume 4 of a 5-volume series based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius):
1. As Jesus appears before Pilate, I remember a time when I experienced being misunderstood, condemned:
2. As Jesus receives his cross, I recall a time when I received a cross in my life:
3. As Jesus falls the first time, I remember when I experienced my first failure, my own limits
4. As Mary encourages Jesus, I remember someone who encouraged me to follow God's call; I remember how he or she looked at me:
5. As Simon helps Jesus carry his cross, I consider who has been there to lift a burden from shoulders, from my heart:
6. As veronica wipes the face of Jesus, I remember the Veronicas in my life--those who stood by me, comforted me, even at the risk of their own rejection:
7 As Jesus falls a second time, I recall the times when I have experienced the helplessness of failing, knowing I would fail, again and again:
8. As the women reach out to comfort Jesus, I remember the faces of those whom I have reached out to comfort, even in my own pain:
9. As Jesus falls a third time, I recall a time when I felt as if I was totally defeated and could not go on:
10. As Jesus is stripped of his clothing, I remember the experience of feeling so emotionally naked, so publicly demeaned, so vulnerable before others:
11. As Jesus is nailed to the cross, I consider the things that bound me, kept me "fastened" to my own sorrow, failures or disappointments:
12. As I imagine Jesus dying on the cross, I try to recall a time when I loved so unconditionally, so completely, that I gave my all:
13. As I imagine Mary holding the dead body of her son, I pause and remember those who have held me up in life, nurtured me, and grieved with me:
14. As Jesus' body is laid in the tomb, I consider what in my life keeps me entombed, where I most experience death:
Meditation in the Dominican Style/Asking Questions:
Which of the "Seven Last Words of Jesus" in the four gospel accounts of The Passion
speak to you the most? Why?
Mark: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Matthew: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Luke: Father forgive them; they don't know what they are doing.
Today you shall be with me in Paradise.
Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.
John: Woman, here is your son. Here is your mother.
I thirst.
It is finished.
Poetic Reflection:
Read the following poem by A.E. Houseman ( 1896). Imagine that, despite the rather English idiomatic language and context, Jesus is actually the speaker. Which phrases do you think are really true and which are not really true to Jesus himself? Do you think Jesus ever second-guessed his choice to leave home and the trade he practiced for many years?:
THE CARPENTER’S SON
Here the hangman stops his cart:
Now the best of friends must part.
Fare you well, for ill fare I
Live, lads, and I will die.
Oh, at home had I but stayed
‘Prenticed to my father’s trade,
Had I stuck to plane and adze,
I had not been lost, my lads.
Then I might have built perhaps
Gallows-trees for other chaps,
Never dangled on my own,
Had I left but ill alone.
Now, you see, they hang me high,
And the people passing by
Stop to shake their fists and curse.
So ‘tis come from ill to worse.
Here hang I, and right and left
Two poor fellows hang for theft:
All the same’s the luck we prove,
Though the midmost hangs for love.
Comrades all, that stand and gaze,
Walk henceforth in other ways;
See my neck and save our own:
Comrades all, leave ill alone.
Make some day a decent end’
Shrewder fellows than your friend.
Fare you well, for ill fare I:
Live, lads, and I will die.
