The Cross is the means by which God heals the broken relationship between himself and humanity, borne out of love. Here is Fr Richard’s homily for today’s Good Friday Liturgy.
Readings for the Liturgy can be found here.
Have you ever fallen out with someone that you care about? Ever had an argument, a row, a tiff? I’m sure all of us have, at one point or another. Sometimes it might be a minor disagreement; or it might be a major bust-up. A breakdown in a relationship doesn’t just happen. There is usually a cause – something said, something done (or not done) by us, the other party, or maybe both. And if it’s a relationship we care about, then the fact a rift has occurred will cause pain and upset. We will want to patch things up, to heal what has gone wrong, and bring about reconciliation. How do we do this? Well first of all we need to meet with the other person. Then we need to acknowledge what has gone wrong, and address the source of the rift. And then somehow we need to overcome it, to get beyond it, perhaps by being prepared to forgive, or be forgiven. Then, at last, we can hope to move forward in hope.
This is what is happening on Good Friday, as recorded in the great Passion Narrative from John that we have just heard, but on a cosmic scale. It is all about God acting to repair the relationship of love between himself and humanity which has been rent asunder by human wickedness and sin. The extent of this sinfulness is laid in the Passion Narrative as we see an innocent man – the Son of God, no less – arrested, beaten, mocked, and executed in the cruellest and most barbaric fashion. But the evidence of human sin is also all around us. Every time we switch on the news or open the papers we see violence, destruction, pain and suffering in our world. Sometimes folk might question the relevance of our Holy Week ceremonies for the modern world. In answer we just have to say, “look around you”. See the terrible things going on in the world, and we see them all summed up in the suffering of Jesus upon the Cross.
But God in Christ on Good Friday is not simply the victim of the forces of sin and evil in the world. He is acting decisively to bring healing to our broken world. And how does he do this? In any human relationship which needs mending, the cause of the breakdown needs to be addressed, confronted, and then overcome. Now surely the worst consequence of human sin is the taking of another life, especially an innocent life. Again, this is something we see all of the time on our news feeds. Life, the most precious gift God can give, is so often treated as worthless by the actions of others. And so God confronts this. Somehow he must take away its power to separate us from him. He does this in the most amazing way possible by undergoing death himself – experiencing the worst of humanity in order to cancel out its power. He is prepared to go to the darkest corner of this world, and by laying down his life, shining the light of his love even there.
Good Friday says to us there is no place, no situation, no experience, no matter how bleak or desparate or awful, where God is not present. He has experienced the worst of this world, and so he is always there with us and with all those who suffer today. As the author of Hebrews says in our second reading “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses”. Jesus takes away the power of sin and death by showing us there is nothing to fear, because he is alongside us every step of the way. But of course, he takes away death’s power over us in another way. Here we must look ahead to Easter Day – indeed we cannot make sense of Good Friday without it, just as we cannot make sense of Easter Day without Good Friday. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead shows us that death, that worst thing standing between us and God, has been decisively defeated. The people who wage war in our world, the people who murder, who terrorise and devalue others, do not have the final say. God has the final say, and it looks like the empty tomb.
Why does God do all of this? Why does he go to such lengths to reach out to us, to undergo all that suffering for our sakes, in order to repair the relationship between himself and humanity? The answer, of course is love. As John says earlier in his Gospel, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that all who believe in him may not perish but have eternal life”. God loves all of us so much that he reaches out to us and is prepared to go to any lengths to bring us back to him. As the hymn puts it, “it is a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be, that God’s own Son should come from heaven, and die to save a child like me”. Perhaps today we seek to understand, to make sense of what is going on at Calvary. Yet understanding can take us only so far. Ultimately we just have to accept. Accept his love, shown to us so starkly, so plainly, and so beautifully upon the wood of the Cross.
The Good Friday Liturgy takes place today at 3pm in St Dyfrig & St Samson, Grangetown.
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