GOOD FRIDAY
14 APRIL 2017
The Passion according to Saint John
is profoundly moving. He does much more than give an account of the suffering
and death of Jesus. His Passion provides
a remarkable theological reflection on the depth of God’s love for us at many
levels. At the very time that the
priests are preparing the paschal lambs for Passover meals, the real Lamb of
God is being sacrificed – not on a sacred altar in the Temple, but on a hill of
execution outside the city walls. The
ancestors of Jesus had expressed their desire for reconciliation with God by
sacrificing lambs for centuries. Now, in
the death of the Word Made Flesh, that reconciliation has occurred. The real Passover has begun and has fulfilled
the Passover from slavery to freedom.
At the center
of this mystery stands the cross. For
the first five centuries of the Christian era, disciples of Jesus Christ could
not bring themselves to portray the cross in art. It was a sign of horror, humiliation, pain,
and Roman cruelty. And yet, it is this
cross which we will bring up the center aisle, proclaiming boldly “Behold the
wood of the cross, on which hung the salvation of the world.” We will carry it over the mosaics of the
Covenants embedded in the aisle. Those
mosaics provide insights into the ways in which God has used something as
ordinary as wood to work out our salvation in time.
The work of
salvation began in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve failed God and
themselves. Instead of trusting that
they had been made in the image of God as creatures, they wanted to become gods
themselves. They wanted to determine
what is good and bad, what is right and wrong.
That grasping for divinity introduced sin and spelled disaster for the
human race. From the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, they took the forbidden fruit. Sin began with the wood of a tree, and the
wood of another tree on Golgotha would defeat sin.
In the
second mosaic, we see the ark that Noah built out of wood to save creation from
destruction. We also see the dove bringing
back an olive branch, a piece of wood signifying peace. The next mosaic pictures the promise God made
to Abraham that his descendents would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and
the sands on the sea. When Abraham
endured his test in faith, he had his son, Isaac carry on his back the wood for
his own sacrifice. The next mosaic
reminds us of the Covenant made with Moses, who carried a wooden staff to part
the Red Sea and provide water from the rock.
The Israelites constructed the Ark of the Covenant out of acacia wood
and carried it with them as they journeyed to the Promised Land. Pictured in the next mosaic, there is a crown
over that ark, signifying God’s promise to bring from the House of King David a
messiah. The final mosaic is the New
Covenant, sealed by David’s promised Messiah, who more than likely worked with
wood alongside his stepfather.
It is no
coincidence that God has worked out our salvation through something as ordinary
as wood. God can and does use any part
of his creation as means to save us. Through
the wood of the cross, God can even take the worst ways in which we pervert his
creation for our own sinful uses and continue the work of salvation. That is why we will come forward to venerate
the cross after the solemn General Intercessions. We venerate the cross to show our deep
gratitude for the way in which Jesus Christ embraced that terrible wood of his
cross to defeat the powers of sin and death.
We venerate the cross to reinforce our faith that whatever crosses we
may be carrying will not ultimately destroy us, because the cross of Christ did
not destroy him. We venerate the cross
to express our confidence that God can continue to use us, his ordinary but
flawed creatures, to bring hope to a fallen world deeply in distress. That is why we call this particular Friday
“Good.” “Behold the wood of the cross,
on which hung the salvation of the world.”
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