Photo by Josh Applegate
Such enormous, inexplicable pain in the world. Looking back at Good Fridays over the years, there’s always something: a Marathon bombing, a school shooting, a deranged pilot to graphically illustrate the point. This year we’ve gone global, with the whole world sheltered in place, while the “invisible enemy” takes its toll.
Arising out of this wreckage today is the cross of Jesus Christ, at one and the same time the proof of the world’s derangement and the source of its healing. Magnify the pain of the world a zillion times and you have not yet taken the measure of how much pain Christ takes upon himself on the cross.
Why did Jesus suffer and die? The answer is given in the memorial that he asked us to celebrate in his Name – This is my body, given up for you, this is my blood poured out for you. Jesus suffered and died for us, out of love.
But why was this necessary? According to the biblical story, which is our story, we human beings made a fateful decision to go our own way apart from God, thus disconnecting ourselves from the source of our life. When you disconnect yourself from the source of your life, you begin to plunge into a void, a kind of nothingness from which you are unable to get yourself out of by your own efforts.
So it puts us human beings in a strange bind. On the one hand, we have within us the capacity to turn against God, but we don’t have what it takes to deal with the consequences of that rebellion. That turning against God takes on a life of its own – or better, a death of its own – leading to a world which is all too familiar to us.
God’s mysterious grace, full of love beyond telling, could not leave us human beings in such a state of alienation and brokenness. That is why he entered into the depths of darkness and pain, so that we might be created anew, that the nothingness of sin might be swallowed up by the greater power of God’s love, and so that we might be re-connected to the source of our life.
And so, if anyone should ask, what is certain in life and in death – so certain that everything else may be anchored in it? The answer: the love of Christ. Only through Christ do we know that God’s love is forgiving. It is that love which in turn impels us to bind up the wounds of our brothers and sisters.
Illustration by Br. Blair Paulus Nuyda, A.A.