Good Friday - The Greatest Words of Love are Spoken on this Day

“He who seeks not the Cross of Christ seeks not the Glory of Christ.”

(Saint John of the Cross)

“Behold, Jesus Christ crucified, who is the only foundation of our hope; He is our mediator and advocate; the victim and sacrifice for our sins. He is goodness and patience itself; His mercy is moved by the tears of sinners, and he never refuses pardon and grace to those who ask it with a truly contrite and humbled heart.”

(Saint Charles Borromeo)

God Died?

Who hangs on the centre tree at the Place of the Skull? 

That’s the question of Good Friday, the conundrum of the Cross. That’s the true “scandal” of Jesus’s crucifixion, in the original sense of the word. The identity of the crucified man is the Stone on which the Church has stumbled again and again.

Whoever that is hanging on the tree, He cannot be God – can He? God gleams with Glory, but that thing on the tree is ugly, mangled, distorted, barely human, much less Divine. God is placid, immoveable, without passion. That one, that thing, shrieks in agonized dismay. God is powerful, but that thing is impotent. God does not die. For polytheistic Greeks, the gods are “immortals;” the deathless ones. Time is death, God is immune from the ravages of time. Dying is the one thing God doesn’t do

But that thing can’t be human either. After all, Jesus is our Saviour, and man cannot save himself. That man on the cross must be some creature, but to save us, He must be an exalted creature, the highest creature there can possibly be. The logic and the confession of Arianism is so obvious, but the Church’s bishops searched the Scriptures, fought and argued, and determined that Arianism is false. Arians cannot speak the Gospel because they misidentify the Crucified One.

Yet surely not! The dying one is God? That would upend everything we know about God. Nicaea says there’s no gap between God and Jesus. The incarnation, the two-natures of Jesus, is the only way out. That is God on the Cross - but God can’t die. What passes through death must be the man-nature of Jesus; not the God-nature. The Son goes to the cross bearing His humanity, and there He and the Father sacrifice His humanity for our salvation. That's the solution - it’s not Arian: Jesus is God Himself, taking human nature. But we can keep our beliefs about God intact. We can say Jesus is God without saying God passes through death.

But that’s Nestorianism, and the bishops also rejected Nestorianism. Searching the Scriptures, they determined that the Bible doesn’t allow us to say Jesus is a creature, nor does it allow us to separate Jesus’s Divinity from His humanity. Arianism and Nestorianism make sense. They are obvious; common-sense. But no, the Church went for nonsense. She rejected the safe, obvious, traditional options.

Faced with the choice between clinging to common sense and upending everything they thought they knew of God, they went with the latter. To be true to the Gospel, the Church determined she had to embrace the wild, the counterintuitive, the revolutionary. To be true to the Gospel, we must say God Himself assumed our mortal humanity to pass through death. To be true to the Gospel, we must proclaim the death of death through the death of God.

The eternal Son did not pass out of existence for three days. Human beings don’t pass out of existence when we die. At its heart, death is separation from God. Life is knowing God; death is estrangement from him. That death is humanity’s curse, and that’s the curse the Son of God assumed for our sake. The Son of God, God from the beginning, God from God and God toward God, whose very being is to be from and with the Father - that Son suffered for our God forsakenness. Over the centuries, the gospel has been domesticated, polished up for polite society. Many think orthodoxy is tired, safe, obvious. They think the God of the gospel is another run-of-the-mill deathless one, only much, much bigger. Forget about atheists and agnostics: Many Christians think this way. 

Chesterton was right:

“To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”

Orthodoxy is wild and whirling, because the God it proclaims and reveals is the God dead and living, who rides the wings of the wind, who walks over the raging waves, who touches lepers and eats and drinks with sinners, who submits to death on a Cross, who marches straight into the gloom of hell to clear it out, the God who undoes our God-forsakenness by taking it on Himself.

The Seven Last Sayings

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Even as He is being nailed to the Cross, still He forgives. His whole mission is to reconcile the world to the Father, and here is the climax of that mission - the ignoble death of a common criminal, stripped, beaten, spat upon, mocked, and nailed to a cross; and yet He forgives.

“Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

The entire purpose of the Cross is to bring salvation to mankind, and the first beneficiary of this salvific sacrifice was the penitent thief. The grace of God moves this man to seek redemption from his sins, just as it moves us to sorrow for our sins.

No one is too far from redemption. This man asked for forgiveness and salvation, with mere moments left to live, and he was granted it.

“Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.”

Through the pain and sorrow He was experiencing on the Cross, Jesus looked down and saw His mother. John had brought Mary to the foot of the Cross, and she experienced the pain and sorrow of a sword piercing her own heart, just as Simeon had prophesied three decades earlier.

As she watched her only child slowly die, He made sure that she would be taken care of by his disciple John.

The same compassion and concern that He had for His mother from the Cross, He has for us. He knows each one of us by name, and knows every hair on our heads, and He loves us through His pain.

"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

What sounds like despair and abandonment is Jesus praying the opening line of Psalm 22. This Psalm of His ancestor King David begins with a lamentation of a righteous man suffering without cause, but ends in acknowledging that God brings victory from defeat, and life from death.

Jesus is reminding us that no matter how bleak a situation may look, God is still in control.

“I thirst.”

Jesus is now ready to drink the Cup of Consummation, the fourth cup of the Passover, the Cup that He asked the Father to remove from Him. He had told His apostles that He would not “drink the fruit of the vine until the kingdom comes,” and now it has come and He asks for a drink.

"It is finished."

Tetelestai - the last word in the Gospel of John. Jesus has accomplished, finished, and consummated His mission. He had offered Himself as the priest and sacrificial victim. The sacrifice of the Lamb of God is completed.

“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Throughout the Gospels we bear witness to the relationship between Father and Son, we see the total trust that Jesus places in His Father, and we see the pleasure that the Father takes on His Son. This is exemplified in the final words of Christ; He is entrusting His spirit to His Father. He is willingly giving up His life in the fullest way, because with His consent to death, death has no power over Him- or us.