Good Friday

April 3, 2026

Jesus finishes his mission

SUGGESTION FOR GOOD FRIDAY, ESPECIALLY THE TRE ORE FROM 12-3PM

Spend some time with the Gospel of John, maybe comparing it to the same events recorded in Matthew’s Gospel from Palm/Passion Sunday on April 5.. You may want to intersperse some music between the sections (see below). Then take a look at two homilies from 2008 from community members, delivered at two different services. Finally, just spend some time with Jesus.

MUSIC MEDITATIONS FOR GOOD FRIDAY
All are on YouTube:
“Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” — (CTCatholicCorner, 4PM Media, Mahalia Jecson, Pegasis and others)
“What Wondrous Love is This”— (Fernando Ortega, Sabine Murza)
“Pie Jesu by Faure” by Kathleen Battle
“Going Home” by Dvorak, sung by Bryn Terfel

GOSPEL — JOHN 18:1-19:42

Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to where there was a garden, into which he and his disciples entered. Judas his betrayer also knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with his disciples. So Judas got a band of soldiers and guards from the chief priests and the Pharisees and went there with lanterns, torches, and weapons. Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, “Whom are you looking for?” They answered him, “Jesus the Nazorean.” He said to them, “I AM.” Judas his betrayer was also with them. When he said to them, “I AM,“ they turned away and fell to the ground. So he again asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” They said, “Jesus the Nazorean.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I AM. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.” This was to fulfill what he had said, “I have not lost any of those you gave me.” Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. Jesus said to Peter, “Put your sword into its scabbard. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?” So the band of soldiers, the tribune, and the Jewish guards seized Jesus, bound him, and brought him to Annas first. He was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was high priest that year. It was Caiaphas who had counseled the Jews that it was better that one man should die rather than the people. Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Now the other disciple was known to the high priest, and he entered the courtyard of the high priest with Jesus. But Peter stood at the gate outside. So the other disciple, the acquaintance of the high priest, went out and spoke to the gatekeeper and brought Peter in. Then the maid who was the gatekeeper said to Peter, “You are not one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” Now the slaves and the guards were standing around a charcoal fire that they had made, because it was cold, and were warming themselves. Peter was also standing there keeping warm. The high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and about his doctrine. Jesus answered him, “I have spoken publicly to the world. I have always taught in a synagogue or in the temple area where all the Jews gather, and in secret I have said nothing. Why ask me? Ask those who heard me what I said to them. They know what I said.” When he had said this, one of the temple guards standing there struck Jesus and said, “Is this the way you answer the high priest?” Jesus answered him, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest. Now Simon Peter was standing there keeping warm. And they said to him, “You are not one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the one whose ear Peter had cut off, said, “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” Again Peter denied it. And immediately the cock crowed. Then they brought Jesus from Caiaphas to the praetorium. It was morning. And they themselves did not enter the praetorium in order not to be defiled so that they could eat the Passover. So Pilate came out to them and said, “What charge do you bring against this man?” They answered and said to him, “If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” At this, Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves, and judge him according to your law.” The Jews answered him, “We do not have the right to execute anyone,“ in order that the word of Jesus might be fulfilled that he said indicating the kind of death he would die. So Pilate went back into the praetorium and summoned Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here.” So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” When he had said this, he again went out to the Jews and said to them, “I find no guilt in him. But you have a custom that I release one prisoner to you at Passover. Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” They cried out again, “Not this one but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a revolutionary. Then Pilate took Jesus and had him scourged. And the soldiers wove a crown out of thorns and placed it on his head, and clothed him in a purple cloak, and they came to him and said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they struck him repeatedly. Once more Pilate went out and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you, so that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak. And he said to them, “Behold, the man!” When the chief priests and the guards saw him they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him. I find no guilt in him.” The Jews answered, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” Now when Pilate heard this statement, he became even more afraid, and went back into the praetorium and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” Jesus did not answer him. So Pilate said to him, “Do you not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above. For this reason the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin.” Consequently, Pilate tried to release him; but the Jews cried out, “If you release him, you are not a Friend of Caesar. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.” When Pilate heard these words he brought Jesus out and seated him on the judge’s bench
in the place called Stone Pavement, in Hebrew, Gabbatha. It was preparation day for Passover, and it was about noon. And he said to the Jews, “Behold, your king!” They cried out, “Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!”Pilate said to them,
“Shall I crucify your king?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus, and, carrying the cross himself, he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, in Hebrew, Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus in the middle. Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews.” Now many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write ‘The King of the Jews,’ but that he said, ‘I am the King of the Jews’.” Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.” When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four shares, a share for each soldier. They also took his tunic, but the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top down. So they said to one another, “Let’s not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it will be,“ in order that the passage of Scripture might be fulfilled that says: They divided my garments among them, and for my vesture they cast lots. This is what the soldiers did. Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home. After this, aware that everything was now finished, in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I thirst.” There was a vessel filled with common wine. So they put a sponge soaked in wine on a sprig of hyssop and put it up to his mouth. When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, “It is finished.” And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit. Now since it was preparation day, in order that the bodies might not remain on the cross on the sabbath, for the sabbath day of that week was a solemn one, the Jews asked Pilate that their legs be broken and that they be taken down. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and then of the other one who was crucified with Jesus. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out. An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true; he knows that he is speaking the truth, so that you also may come to believe. For this happened so that the Scripture passage might be fulfilled: Not a bone of it will be broken. And again another passage says: They will look upon him whom they have pierced. After this, Joseph of Arimathea, secretly a disciple of Jesus for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate if he could remove the body of Jesus. And Pilate permitted it. So he came and took his body. Nicodemus, the one who had first come to him at night, also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about one hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and bound it with burial cloths along with the spices, according to the Jewish burial custom. Now in the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been buried. So they laid Jesus there because of the Jewish preparation day; for the tomb was close by.

COMPANIONS FOR THE JOURNEY

Homily for Good Friday 2008
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. IT 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 by Catherine Wolff

Sept. 14, 2008

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.

A Good Friday Meditation Adapted from Sr. Marina Wiederkehr, O.S.B. from Behold Your Life: A Pilgrimage Through Your Memories

Into your hands I commit my spirit.

Read Psalm 31. Stand beneath the cross of Jesus today and embrace the mystery of suffering—that mystery that none of us can fully understand. Touch anew the ways suffering has been your teacher. I once heard someone say: “I am in pain but I am not suffering.” At the time I wondered what she meant. Now I think I know. Perhaps it has something to do with acceptance. Ponder the difference between suffering and pain. Just be there with Jesus today and accept the healing that is within your reach. Hold gently the pain of the entire world this day. Today I am contemplating the mystery of suffering. Now that I am here at he foot of the cross what can I say that matters? I am putting my life on the cross with Jesus, but what does that mean? I can’t put any of those memories on the cross without putting myself on the cross with them. I cannot disconnect myself from my pain and suffering. And so I feel it all again: the resentments, the angers, the pain of rejection, the fears, the guilt, the sin and immaturity, my jealousies and envy, my addictions and my loneliness! They are all here with me on this Good Friday. And now that I’m here with all this baggage, I do not even pray to be rid of it. Standing before the cross I proclaim a gospel that God undestands, “Here is my life. This is who I am. This is what I have to offer you. Here is my gospel—my bittersweet good news. I am wounded, broken, and scarred. Yet with all these burdens I am still able to be your song.” Even here at the foot of the cross my blessings seem to stand in the background. I invite them to come closer, and they do. They step forward. It feels like a great homecoming. Everyone is present. Deep gratitude is here. She stands close by me, reminding me of all the ways she’s blessed me. Immense love and healing grace are present. Fierce yearning is here. Constant conversion and childlike trust have arived. Always forgiving is here. Abundant joy is present. Lasting beauty stands by my side. Ever faithful smiles through the crowd. Even quiet peace has arrived at the scene. The two sides stand and look at each other as if to say, “We’re not really divided. We’ve always been one.” The blessings embrface the bruises. The bite is gone in that embrace. I look upon the cross and I am healed, I look upon what has bitten me and blessed me and I am mended. Yes! There is a great mending on this Friday that is good. Jesus, never allow me to turn away from my life again. I put the gospel of my life into your hands. In your good time I know that you will wrap a cloak of transformation around me. Now it is time to wait and keep vigil with your love that has been poured out. In some small way I know that my love has mingled with yours. Together we will wait for resurrection.

First Impressions—The Easter Vigil by Jude Siciliano, OP

Genesis 1:1–2:2 (Psalm 104), Genesis 22:1-18 (Psalm 16), Exodus 14:15–15:1 (Ex 15), Isaiah 54:5-14 (Psalm 30), Isaiah 55:1-11 (Is 12), Baruch 3:9-15, 32-4:4 (Psalm 19), Ezekiel 36:16-17a, 18-28 (Psalm 42), Romans 6:3-11, Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Matthew 28:1-10

We have a rich diet of scriptures this evening! Let’s pause for a momentary overview and notice their flow. Start with the creation account and the pair of humans who are given stewardship for what God has created. This is a perfect reading to address how well or poorly we have done in our care of what God has placed in our hands—the created world around us. With the daily extinction of plant and animal species throughout the world and the pollution of rivers, fields and air in our immediate environment, we must seriously ask if the original blessing God said over the humans in the garden has really taken! If it has, then why don’t we share the Creator’s love for everything God saw as “good?” It is because sin entered the world and defaced the image and likeness of God that was created in each of us. We are in need of help. God comes to help us, and it begins with a call. Abraham and Sarah are God’s called and chosen ones and from them shall come descendants who will “find blessing.” The third reading shows God’s deliverance of the enslaved chosen people and reflects how God will deliver us from sin—through the parting-waters. Tonight’s readings carry a strong baptismal theme. Hear the prophets Isaiah, Baruch and Ezekiel proclaim God’s forgiveness and invitation to a wayward people to return to “the One who has become your husband…” If nothing else, the prophets make quite clear that God is crazy in love with us! Where shall we go for rebirth and renewal? Isaiah directs us, “All who are thirsty, come to the water!” God’s graciousness is the strongest message from these readings. This graciousness does not come because the people have been faithful. Based on their own merits, Ezekiel says, they would deserve nothing, for they have “profaned among the nations” God’s holy name. “Not for your sakes do I act, house of Israel, but for the sake of my holy name...” God just continues to be loving and forgiving despite how we act, because God just can’t help it. It’s God’s nature! And God is always doing what comes naturally! This night the biblical waters will flow again as new Christians are initiated into our community. While we humans have taken some meandering paths since our creation that have turned us away from God’s original blessing and plan for us, tonight’s readings remind us of God’s faithfulness to us. We may not have deserved such a “crazy-lover”, but God tells us through Ezekiel that, “for the sake of my holy name,” God will not let us go. We hear in the readings God’s ultimate act of love for us, the sending of the Son. Jesus shows by his life and message that God loves us despite ourselves. Even under threat of death, Jesus will not renege or back away from this message. Isaiah described it well, God would not give up on us, “So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; my word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I send it.” (fourth reading.) The congregation will be somewhat fatigued by the evening hour and the length of the readings. But that is no excuse to omit the homily; just keep it focused and short. We will have ample opportunity to preach from several resurrection and post-resurrection accounts over the next weeks. I thought my preaching this evening would focus on the Romans text. It grabs my attention as it speaks about being “baptized into his death.” What does it mean and what are its consequences for our life? No one talks about that at baptisms—“baptized into his death.” Why not? Is it because it would turn off potential candidates? Is it because we want to stress the bright side, the resurrection and new life? Of course we do. But these Triduum days remind us that to get to the resurrection, Jesus had to pass first through his death. We need to have a dying of who we are and what we have been—we too need to pass through death to get to a new life, a new way of living. In a manner of speaking, we were baptized first into the human experience—the waters of the womb was our first baptism. We were immersed into the human condition. It is our life and the only life we would have known. Besides its joys, there are the limitations, and the contagion we caught just by walking along with others in our condition. We catch the illness of the tubercular ward just by walking through it and breathing the air. Sin is in the air, and we breathe it in from the first breaths we take—it is racism, sexism, aggressions, selfishness—you know the list. We have been breathing this stale and contaminating air all our lives. We have to stop breathing in this way and begin breathing in a new way. We have, according to Paul, to die and have a whole new life. How can this happen? Paul has a special moment in mind when he speaks to Christians about having died. He is speaking about being “baptized into Christ.” Paul sees Christ as a representative figure; he is the new human being (Adam). In 2 Cor. 5:15-15) Paul’s teaching reflects this representation model when he says that Christ’s death was on behalf of us all—he died and so “all have died.” He died and we die by being linked to him in our baptism. At a particular moment, our baptism, we died to sin. (Read back a few verses for this, 6:1-3) Baptism in the early church looked like a dying and a rising. Remember that immersion was the more typical form of baptism. To be immersed in water was to be “buried”—when you came up from the water you were “raised.” (Acts 8: 36-39) You stopped breathing when you went under the water. When you came up you took your first breath as an entirely new person, the way an infant takes a first breath at birth. This baptismal dying involved the ending of our past way of living. So, whereas we once lived in sin, now we live in a whole new life. Notice the continual use of the expression used to describe who the baptized are we are “with him”—with him through baptism, “with him through a death like his,” “crucified with him,” “died with him,” and “shall also live with him.” The words Paul uses to describe being “grown into union with him” literally translated means, “grown together with him.” It is like a grafting. We are now, through our baptism, grafted to Christ; growing together with him. We were buried in death with him and so we will be raised with him. The final resurrection is still in the future. We are very aware this new state of union, grafting into Jesus, is far from a perfected state. We are in the in-between time, awaiting what Paul assures us will come, “we shall live with him.” And so, the human struggle against the “bad air” of sin continues. It is an atmospheric pollution in our lives; hard to take a breath without breathing it in. But we are not on our own. We first of all have a new life in us and Paul reminds us that, “Christ died to sin, once for all.” That means that, though sin killed him, it did not defeat him. He triumphed over sin in his lifetime and he won the final battle over sin at his death. Now his new life contains that victory and our being grafted to him passes that victory to us. The union brings his resurrected life with its power over sin to us. Now we live directed and energized by a new life force. We look to the completion when, because of our union with him, we will be “united with him in the resurrection.”

Quotable

Christianity is not merely a religion that was marketed well with just the right political spin by gifted writers. It is a living, breathing, ongoing conversation between God, humanity and all creation empowered by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without the resurrection, there would have been no Christianity, no Christendom, no hymns, no seminaries, no churches and no nativity scenes. Jesus lives, not in the sense that King Lear or Hamlet or Handel’s Messiah live on in the hearts and minds of the people, but in the sense that something totally new has happened and keeps happening. The resurrection is the ultimate breakthrough of God into our world that transcends all nature and history. Without it, we wouldn’t care one whit about Bethlehem and the manger, which is why every year my wife and I try to send Easter letters instead of Christmas cards and I congratulate all the once-a-year visitors for choosing Easter above all others. At least they picked the right Sunday to come!

–William J. Carl III, in “The Living Pulpit” (January-March 1998)

Faith Book

Mini-reflections on the Sunday scripture readings designed for persons on the run. “Faith Book” is also brief enough to be posted in the Sunday parish bulletins people take home.

From today’s Gospel: After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb… The angel said to the women..., “Do not be afraid! I know that you are seeking Jesus the crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said.”

Reflection: It is, “After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning.” The event happens on an ordinary day in the week when people are finished with the sabbath and have returned to their daily work and routines—mostly struggling at very hard work to feed and support their families. Don’t expect resurrection appearances just on high holy days, in dedicated places and under certain, ideal conditions. Look for the Risen One where “the rubber hits the road,” in daily life, while doing ordinary chores. If the Risen Christ isn’t with us where we work out our Christian lives, he is still in the grave with the stone still sealing the entrance and the guards keeping close watch.

So, we ask ourselves:

• Have I discovered new life after a deep loss or disappointment?

• Who helped me find it?

• How can I bring the Risen Christ to another person suffering loss, or death?