Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12 Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9 John 18:1 – 19:42

The annual Good Friday Service of the Word, the Veneration of the Cross, and Holy Communion proclaims the very same scripture texts each year. The mood of the day is solemn. The reality of suffering and death are in the fore of the mind of anyone who appreciates the religious events recalled and celebrated today. But, today’s feast is neither grim nor tragic. Today’s liturgy is celebrated in the middle of ordinary busyness. People come from their usual ways of life, gather in a sacred assembly, and dispose themselves to hear the most difficult message to fall on human ears. The Cross of Christ is the focal image. It was in Roman Imperial days an instrument of humiliating torture and death to intimidate, manipulate, control and punish people. Men, women, children, and even infants, were crucified. Jesus died on a cross just as did the others. But, the Church hears the narratives around this lethal tool always aware that his death was not the end, but the beginning of a profound, indescribable, miraculous and mysterious change. Indeed, death conquered a human life. But a new kind of life in turn conquered death. Today’s liturgy is about embracing the messiness of life’s realities with hope and confidence that through death will come a life our faith calls “new,” “complete,” and “everlasting.”

Today’s first lesson from (Deutero-) Isaiah, is from the Fourth Suffering Servant Song, and personifies the People Israel who had been conquered, enslaved, and deported to Babylon in the early 6^th Century BC. A half century later they had been freed and exhorted to return to, rebuild, and restore Judah, Jerusalem and the way of life described in the newly refined Torah. The text is rhetorical and ironic. Who would ever expect such a defeated people to rise up and thrive again? ... and, at the hands of Gentiles! The Chosen People are metaphorically personified into a servant who has suffered even while in service of God. Christians have added a New Testament meaning to this personification and see in the Suffering Servant the pre-figured messiah, Jesus the Christ and Son of God. The Christian nuance is that the suffering by Jesus was entirely undeserved. He suffered undeservedly, in innocents, in place of us who deserve to suffer for our own sinfulness. Deutero-Isaiah grasps the idea of vicarious suffering in the famous lines we hear today, “Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured ... he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole; by his stripes we were healed ... the LORD laid upon him the guilt of us all...” The early Christians immediately appreciated the great sacrifice that Jesus had made in loving so completely that he accepted even death in return. Isaiah ended today’s lesson with “he shall take away the sins of many, and win pardon for their offenses.” How to consider vicarious suffering (for us), which brings out the best from those who are genuinely guilty (us), is among the most difficult of all life’s questions. The only frame of reference in which such suffering makes sense is in the context of complete, mature, and responsible love.

The source of our second reading today is the Letter to the Hebrews. It places another title on the Suffering Servant personified in the Crucified and Raised Jesus, that of high priest. The priestly function in Jerusalem Temple worship was to receive the sacrifice and then to present it to God by destroying at least part of it in fire. There were many priests but only one high priest at a time, who’s task was to occasionally enter alone into the Jerusalem Temple’s Holy of Holies. As high priest Jesus became the very sacrifice himself. In his own dying and rising, he entered into the heavenly Sanctuary of God on high! Of greatest importance to the early Jewish Christians was this ability of Jesus as high priest to sympathize (i.e., to feel completely and to appreciate genuinely) the totality of human weakness and sinfulness. This retrospective insight of what Jesus had already done in his Paschal Sacrifice was an early Jewish-Christian appreciation of Jesus as Savior in terms of Temple Sacrificial vocabulary. We still use many of these terms today, even though they are somewhat obscure to our ways of reflection and to our categories of thought. Perhaps we must simply accept that he gave his all for us, in spite of our behaviors, out of generous love for us, and without fear of suffering and death. When we make the assertion “Jesus died for us” we have to step back and view the larger picture. His passion and death, says the Church, were necessary! Did that mean that God the Father wanted Jesus to die and maybe even that God enjoyed it? Certainly not! Rather, the necessity means that nothing could stop his perfect and complete love for others, not even for those others who would revile and kill him. He countered violence and hatred with superior love and generosity. His love – for others, for us, and for God – was unimaginably larger than any mean, self-centered sinfulness of those others, even of ours! Today’s festival is a festival of self-less, generous, sacrificial giving, and profound love in spite of the harsh reality of evil.

John’s Gospel provides the Passion Narrative for today’s liturgy. It follows the Last Supper narrative which is comprised in the main of the foot-washing lesson and the practical exercise in theological reflection. The story begins with the “handing over” of Jesus by his own disciple (Judas), continues with condemnation by his own people (the high priest and crowds), crucifixion and the abuse of power by the Gentiles (the Romans), and a public, humiliating death on the cross. All this took place in spite of his innocence, integrity, and love. His hearings before the high priest and Pilate, the denials by a very anxious Peter, the crowd of his own people crying out “Crucify him!” and all the other dynamics in this narrative paint a portrait of Jesus very much as Deutero-Isaiah wrote. Jesus was that innocent servant who “though he was harshly treated, he submitted and opened not his mouth ... though he had done no wrong nor spoken any falsehood...” Pilate, a conflicted character in the story, wanted to do no further harm to Jesus than had already been inflicted by his own people. Yet, it was his fear of institutional authority that moved him to a cowardly misuse of power when he was told, “If you release him, you are no friend of Caesar.” Yet, in his dialogue with Jesus, in spite of his flawed character, he had seized upon the question, “What is truth?” Simon Peter and Pilate represent strong but fragile personalities in this drama. Each was overwhelmed with forces beyond his control. Each tried, but failed, to rise to the occasion. Life is so messy when fear and power are involved – in those days and today!

The Cross, and thus crucifixion, has become the principal Christian symbol for engaging life in the most realistic and loving of ways. Today’s festival challenges and encourages us to live fully in the present, in spite of the messy and off-putting situations we encounter. Fortunately, we know how the Gospel narrative ends. In only a short while, we will hear the remarkable victory of life over death!