Good Friday Lessons

Up until this year, Good Friday always struck me as an occasion that was primarily about sorrow: sorrow for sin, sorrow for Jesus' suffering, sorrow in saying yes while embracing my own cross. Desolation, emptiness, death. Sorrow.

This year, I was changed by some words from the CL Way of the Cross.

"Omnipotent God, look upon our humanity broken, because of its mortal weakness and make it live again by the passion of your only Son." It is a jolt of life with which He shakes up our broken humanity and our mortal weakness. Make it live again through the sacrifice, the sorrow and His death. -- Msgr. Luigi Giussani, from All the Earth Seeks Your Face

And then:

Why did He come? And why did the world come into being? One must believe that I have a certain importance, I who am nothing.... How is it possible that I am not great if I've messed up so many things in the world, disordered so many things in the world, and such a great world, at that? If I've started such a tragic history? A God, God went out of His way, God sacrificed Himself for me. This is Christianity.
-- Charles Peguy, Veronique

And then (this passage, read aloud for the group by myself!):

Each man that, by faith in Him, by following Him, performs even the smallest gesture of sacrifice, knowingly connecting it to His unjust death, this small man who performs the least work in conjunction with His death becomes a great man.... So there's nothing that can be useless in life: you just need to intend it as an offering, a link with the mystery of that man who was God and who died to save us all. -- Msgr. Luigi Giussani to unversity students, Milan, 1995

Suddenly, the focus was no longer on suffering, but on God's love, Jesus' love that made Him obedient to the Father's will -- and what this love does right now. My value -- the value of my eternal soul (and even my temporal life) and the value of humanity at large -- that brought about the cross! I have often struggled over when embracing the cross, as Jesus commands us, and as it has sometimes become in my lived experience -- when does "embracing the cross" become an act of self-annihilation, contrary to the will of God. I think the answer is right here. If my motivation for embracing the cross ceases to be the love of God -- the fact of being completely driven along by the immense power of God -- then my embracing the cross ceases to be following Christ and becomes instead some kind of a perverted, self-inflicted death wish.

Let me try to give examples. When I lived in Japan I believed emotional and spiritual isolation to be part of the cross that I needed to embrace. I was only just beginning to realize that my reality was serving to propel me out of myself, to enable me to give myself and to know my fundamental need for both social and spiritual human community. There were also times in my spiritual journey when I believed I had to forsake certain things I enjoyed, like my literature collection or "worldly" music, because I took what someone else believed to be wisdom for my life as the will of God. But neither my suffering isolation nor my trashing prized possessions were calls that emanated from the love of God. I embraced them, though, as a way of showing God I could grit my teeth and do anything "for Him." These were, at best, feats of religious-looking self-accomplishment.

So, what is the antidote? Constant awareness of God's immense love for me, setting my reason straight first of all about how His love motivates. The Son does everything the Father does, and I am called to imitate what I see the Son, and His close friends, doing. This is the experience of God's love in the community of the Church, and this experience (and NOT merely my own grit) is my path to follow Christ. Gratitude flows from this experience and continues to feed my awareness of God's immense love. I cultivate delight in God's works through memory of His great acts, both in salvation history in all time and within my own life. And prayer: constant awareness of the "daily offering"-- this is all for and with you, my Jesus -- and constant invocation of the Holy Spirit to fan the flame of love ever brighter in my soul.

The Good Friday readings reminded me that "offering it up" is not a Catholic way to be stoic. It is a miracle of love. The first miracle of the love of Jesus is His death, which He offered for this little speck of creation, whom He could have simply whisked from existence. Instead, the entire universe is redeemed, and I was gifted with divine sonship in baptism. The next miracle is when that love, right here, today, enables me to embrace my sorrow, my suffering, with love, unite it with Jesus, and participate in the spread of grace and the salvation of souls.

That is some tremendous power!