Good Friday at home

Fr. Gareth’s homily, the Lord’s Passion, Good Friday, 10/4/20, St John the Baptist Church, Clontarf

Isiah 52: 13 – 53: 12; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5: 7-9; John 18: 1 - 19:42 

‘It is accomplished.’ The mystery of life and death is a very great mystery, a mystery beyond anything we can imagine. On Good Friday Jesus Christ dies on the Cross – it’s hard to fathom. 

Standing at the foot of the Cross we still cannot really belief that it could be so. On the Cross Jesus holds all of life; he embraces all that life throws at him; he embraces all of humanity – his own humanity and ours – and offers everything , even suffering and death itself to God his Father in heaven. ‘It is accomplished.’ It is complete. We have been given a whole new understanding of the meaning of life and death.

Today standing at the foot of the Cross, what are we learning? Standing at the foot of the Cross with all of life laid open before us, standing in this very moment at the foot of the Cross in a broken world, held captive by Covid-19, with sickness and suffering all around us, disruption and loss overtaking us, what are we learning?

Everything stopped for a moment at the foot of the Cross, and it seems that everything has stopped for us now too. We are marching time, reflecting again on the mystery of life and on the nearness and meaning of death. Everything is brought into closer view. What it is that is important to us is being given the opportunity to become clearer to us again, to shape us, if we can allow ourselves to be calm and take it in.

‘Take care of your selves’, Pope Francis said this week, ‘Take care of yourselves for a future that will come – remembering that in the future what has happened will do you good.’

It would have been difficult to understand this on Good Friday but we now know that the Cross was not the end. The Cross is not the end.  We venerate the Cross not for its own sake but because through the Cross the Christian understands that we have been redeemed, saved, set free, to live the life of committed love, the life of Christ, understanding and living life and death in a new way. There will be suffering and pain, death and loss, but the Christian is on a journey with Jesus through life and death into the fullness of life, revealed in his resurrection from the dead into life eternal.

Even as we stand at the foot of the Cross, and reverence it in the church, or this year at home, as Christians as we look out on our world we are already seeking to live here and now the Kingdom of God made known to us by the love and care and commitment and generosity of Jesus Christ. The Son of God and our brother, ‘carries all our sufferings’, as we heard in our Scripture reading, ‘has become for us the source of eternal salvation’. It is he, ‘from whom we will find grace when we are in need of help.’

‘This is a time of conversion’, Pope Francis says, conversion of minds and hearts. ‘Let it not slip by us, he says, ‘let’s move ahead’ – with a new understanding, a new way of life, in the healing presence of Jesus Christ, crucified yes, but risen from the dead.