Good Friday 2006 - Dom Brendan
The comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen once said that he didn’t mind dying, he just didn’t want to be there when it happened. Few of us do. Ultimately we will have no choice in the matter. Death is part of the sad and inexorable logic of human existence that demands that every child born of every human mother will, one day, die. The trajectory between our births and deaths is a straight line called time that pushes relentlessly into tomorrow. Each day of a life lived means one less day to live because there is a finite number of heart beats in every human life.
This is a fact that even the Lord Jesus Christ himself could not escape. The moment he was conceived in the womb of his mother he was bound by the universal law of death. This is the great scandal of the Incarnation that we seldom pay adequate attention to: the God who takes on human flesh in Jesus Christ becomes the God who dies. A scandal so great that debunking Calvary is a multi-million dollar industry: from the so called “Gospel of Judas” to the Passover Plot, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and a potboiler about Leonardo Da Vinci which you will find in the fiction section at Borders.
Of course Jesus Christ could have died quietly in his own bed of complications brought on by old age and infirmity. But he did not. He died at the prime of life, in one of the most brutal, degrading and painful forms of capital punishment. To crucify was not merely to execute, it was to psychology destroy the victim with torture, isolation, ridicule and humiliation through a protracted and agonizing death. The nails were driven through the hollows of the wrist striking the median nerve causing immediate, overwhelming and prolonged agony. Bypassing the major arteries, these wounds were not meant to be immediately fatal, but so that the maximum suffering could be sustained for the longest possible time. So that in the end the crucified was left begging for death as a relief.
Doesn’t it make you wonder why God chose the cross as the instrument of our salvation? Yet, it is here, before the scandal and failure of the cross that the Liturgy of Good Friday asks us to stand. The Gospel does not attempt to explain the divine logic of the cross, but only to proclaim it. God has become completely one with sin and death and has not stopped being God there. And this is not what we expected, that God would come and show his power and glory by a shameful death: that he would give blessing through one cursed, freedom through a slave, righteousness through one made sin, wealth through one made poor, wisdom through foolishness, strength through weakness, and life through one man’s death.
But then, that’s why they call it Good Friday isn’t it?
This is a fact that even the Lord Jesus Christ himself could not escape. The moment he was conceived in the womb of his mother he was bound by the universal law of death. This is the great scandal of the Incarnation that we seldom pay adequate attention to: the God who takes on human flesh in Jesus Christ becomes the God who dies. A scandal so great that debunking Calvary is a multi-million dollar industry: from the so called “Gospel of Judas” to the Passover Plot, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and a potboiler about Leonardo Da Vinci which you will find in the fiction section at Borders.
Of course Jesus Christ could have died quietly in his own bed of complications brought on by old age and infirmity. But he did not. He died at the prime of life, in one of the most brutal, degrading and painful forms of capital punishment. To crucify was not merely to execute, it was to psychology destroy the victim with torture, isolation, ridicule and humiliation through a protracted and agonizing death. The nails were driven through the hollows of the wrist striking the median nerve causing immediate, overwhelming and prolonged agony. Bypassing the major arteries, these wounds were not meant to be immediately fatal, but so that the maximum suffering could be sustained for the longest possible time. So that in the end the crucified was left begging for death as a relief.
Doesn’t it make you wonder why God chose the cross as the instrument of our salvation? Yet, it is here, before the scandal and failure of the cross that the Liturgy of Good Friday asks us to stand. The Gospel does not attempt to explain the divine logic of the cross, but only to proclaim it. God has become completely one with sin and death and has not stopped being God there. And this is not what we expected, that God would come and show his power and glory by a shameful death: that he would give blessing through one cursed, freedom through a slave, righteousness through one made sin, wealth through one made poor, wisdom through foolishness, strength through weakness, and life through one man’s death.
But then, that’s why they call it Good Friday isn’t it?
posted by Prior Peter, OSB | 8:34 AM
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