BONUS HOMILY: Good Friday 2022

Good Friday looks a lot different than most of the days when we gather as a community. Most of the time when we gather as a Catholic community, we gather to celebrate the Mass, to celebrate the great event when through the power of prayer, God transforms bread and wine into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. This great transformation is the presence of God in the world, the Eucharist, the reason Catholics gather. We call it, and I repeat over and over again, the source and summit of our faith, the origin and destination—where our faith comes from and where our faith is going.

This great mystery of our faith is removed from us on Good Friday. We don’t celebrate Mass on Good Friday. We still receive Communion; indeed, that the Communion we share today was consecrated last night at the Holy Thursday Mass is a great symbol of the continuation that exists between the two celebration and the celebration that we look forward to in our Easter celebrations tomorrow night and Sunday Morning. But the absence of a Mass today is a unique thing; in fact, Good Friday and Holy Saturday are the only two days of the year that there is not a Catholic Mass. Sometimes, Priests need days off or communities can’t gather, but always, every day, somewhere in the world, at all times except Good Friday and Holy Saturday, there is a Mass being celebrated. The great absence of this prayer, of this celebration, of this opportunity for our community to gather is minimized by what we do here, in this unique way that we gather, this unique way we manifest our prayer and raise our intentions to God.

We gather in memorial, in commemoration, of Jesus’ death, this very sad moment in our salvation history. The man Jesus is stripped, beaten, and the crucified beside two criminals, where our Lord who did nothing wrong is treated with such contempt and violence and evil. Yet in the last moments of Jesus’ life, as we hear in the Gospel of St John today, His focus is not on His suffering; His focus is not on His impending death, but indeed, it is on the Church, the community of believer that He will leave behind.

So, in this great action of prayer and this great sacrifice, He also takes this great action of entrusting the Church in the Grace and Providence of His Mother, Mary, who will be there for a time to journey with the Church as a guide, as a leader, as an example of what it is and how it is to follow Christ. Mary, we know, followed Christ Her whole life perfectly, from the moments before His birth and beyond the moments after His death. Mary is a perfect example of what Christian faith is and how Christian faith should be lived out. 

Faced with the death of her son, she provides for us a model of how to deal with suffering, how to deal with sadness: meeting and encountering her son who has been beaten and flogged and is now crucified, there is no description of a profound change in Mary; she continues along in her mission, ministry, and prayer as a mother, disciple, and lover of Jesus. This reveals to us a great acceptance, and in the great acceptance of her suffering, Mary makes Christ present by bearing suffering beside Him. She carries out her daily duties, but there could be no denial that suffering carries tangibly in her life. Indeed, the great tradition of the Church gives Mary the Crown of Martyrdom not because she was killed violently as the rest of the other martyrs in our tradition have but because of the great suffering she endured seeing her Son crucified and die on the Cross. 

In this great example of what it is to suffer, we see what it is to bear the wounds of Christ without actually physically bearing the wounds of Christ. We see in this a model of discipleship, an invitation and a reminder that our suffering, although it is not physically on the Cross with Christ, it is similarly offered to the Lord and with the Lord. Our suffering has the opportunity to be a great prayer of supplication to the Lord, an opportunity to bring our suffering as prayer to the Lord as Mary did and as Isaiah describes when he anticipates how the Messiah will bear “our infirmities and carry our diseases” in the first reading.

Even if all we can do is suffer beside the Lord, He will use that suffering as a great prayer, as a great invitation to draw deeper and deeper into relationship with Him and deeper and deeper into imitation of Him. Suffering can and indeed does become the holiest part of our lives. Sometimes, I think we would like to imagine that holiness is pious things we do like kneeling in the Church or doing great acts of service, but what the Gospel reveals to us today, what the model of Mary shows us today, is that the greatest act of Christian Faith is suffering. When we see the hurt and the brokenness of the world, but we choose to worship God anyway, that is great Christian faith. When we act not in absence or ignorance of that suffering, nor when we expect to see some miraculous removal of that suffering, we truly see that at the base of the Cross, God’s action is made manifest in the world. Somehow we see through that suffering to anticipate the great glory which is to come, the great glory of removal of suffering, the great glory that is the plan of our salvation. 

Somehow the sufferings we endure become the wounds not just of the Crucified Christ, but the Risen Christ as well—the Risen Christ who still bears the wounds of His crucifixion, the Risen Christ who still manifests this suffering. Christ is made manifest, the Glory of God is made manifest, in the sacrificial action that exists beyond His actual Resurrection. In our own lives when we bear suffering, and maybe especially when it never seems to go away, somehow God uses that for his glory and goodness and when we arrive into the Kingdom of Heaven and celebrate the great wedding feast He promises, the great banquet which is foreshadowed when Christ receives wine on the Cross in the Gospel today and proclaims that “it is finished.”

In the Letter to the Hebrews, it says that “we have a great high Priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses and has been tested as we are,” who knows our human experience. God who is made man endures the difficulty of human life with us and for us, to show us that His glory can be revealed despite the brokenness and hurt of the world. Christ is somehow always there, and perhaps most profoundly, in the midst of suffering, hurt, in the midst of His Crucifixion.