Image: Unsplash/Wim van 't Einde
As a child I always wondered what was so “good” about Good Friday given its silent solemnity in Church and at home where I truly had to uncharacteristically “behave”, and because of the sadness of the commemoration itself.
Sometimes, even as adults, we can become stuck in the “gloom” of the day, and it becomes almost impossible to see beyond it. Indeed, this year given the war in Ukraine, violence in so many places locally and globally, the continuing pandemic and its repercussions, the devastating consequences of climate change and its consequences for the poorest of the poor, we may be feeling very stuck, overwhelmed, and frustrated – alone in the darkness! On the other hand, some of us may want to deny “Good Friday” and move directly to the alleluias of Easter morning. Sister Gemma Simmonds says that in this case “we can appear glibly optimistic and superficial in our engagement with the crucifixion of Christ that continues in his desperately suffering people and God’s desecrated creation.”
So, then what is so “good” about Good Friday? Perhaps it is the paradox of light in the darkness, the both/and of cross and resurrection, death and new life echoed in our liturgical celebration of the Easter Triduum and in the natural world with its springtime promise of new shoots emerging from the still cold Earth. Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim in Norway describes this reality. He writes,
“The path will, in a Christian optic, necessarily go through the cross; but the cross is a passage, the emblem of Christ’s Pasch. It looms large on the horizon but bears the promise of new, endless life and flourishing to be found on the other side.”
Here we find hope in the darkness, promise in the shadows, the very place and condition of our growth and new life. In Christ’s acceptance of his suffering, definitely not chosen but imposed upon him by forces of injustice, we see the goodness of unconditional love. And, as the ancient hymn reminds us, when we “survey the wondrous cross”, we see the One who extravagantly loved to the end and then loves the world into resurrection.
“It is precisely this great love that invites and calls us to love radically”
image: unsplash/Yannick Pulver
It is precisely this great love that in turn invites and calls us to love radically, to the end, to join our own struggles with the suffering of the world; the suffering world that includes not only we humans but the whole of creation. In Romans 8 we read that creation itself cries out for liberation. God’s salvation embraces all the world’s sufferings, cosmic, social, and personal. This Good Friday, let’s seek the goodness of the day, embrace it, and live it by our presence, image of God’s presence, and then as we intone again the great alleluias of Easter may we receive hope and become God’s people of promise in this struggling world.
-Sister Mary Rowell, CSJ