Reflection - Good Friday

“It is finished!” (Jn 19:30) These are the words that we will hear from the Cross as we gather on this Good Friday.

Loss. Grief. Hopelessness. Despair. These are all feelings that can be evoked from the Good Friday Passion reading, the veneration of the Cross, and the reception of the Eucharist. These are feelings that are relevant to our experience today as grief and loss, are concepts that are far too familiar to us and the entire world as war, violence, and atrocities continue in Ukraine, the Holy Land, and so many other places around the world. Through all of our personal and collective losses, Good Friday invites us to live in the moment and honor the challenges of our reality of today as we reflect on the image of Christianity, Jesus on the Cross.

Many theologians have described the scene like this: Jesus’ body on the Cross as an icon of utter divine, in solidarity with our pain and our problems…our central transformative image for the soul. Good Friday calls us deeper into relationship with God. A further reflection on the Cross reveals that Jesus died for us not just in a merely transactional sense, but rather in a much deeper transformational sense. The ultimate act of injustice that reveals the brokenness of humanity is also an act of ultimate divine love and solidarity. All suffering in the world clearly did not go away after Jesus’s death, but a new perspective can be brought to it as even in the midst of hardship, injustice, and tragedy – God is in it with us!

In Jesus, we see Infinite Love longing for union with us not just in the good times, but also in the most wretched experiences -- in our suffering and in our inflicting suffering on others. In all of these experiences, He waits to forgive and heal us. Today, with Mary and the others at the foot of the Cross, let us be quiet and observant.  God is hanging on a tree.

He whispers, “It is finished!” …..but perhaps it’s just beginning.