Homily - Good Friday, 2009
During
the three days of the Triduum - Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter -- we are
exposed to some of the most familiar texts in scripture.
I find that familiarity can be the bane of one’s spiritual
journey. The problem is not with the
scriptures. These readings are among
the most dramatic one is likely to encounter, and the drama is likely to be
enhanced -- especially here at Bellarmine –
by great liturgies.
The
danger is that our responses may have subsided into the purely notional.
We’ve heard it all before. Judas
betrays Jesus, Peter denies him three times,
Pilate washes his hands, . . . On
it goes. The need is to move beyond
the notional - to an immersion in the texts – to realize these
sacred stories. And how do we do
that? St Ignatius Loyola offered a
suggestion that has worked for many followers for almost four centuries - that
we read the sacred stories with imagination.
Put yourself into the story, he would say.
Perhaps you are a follower of Jesus,
who happens upon that scene in Gethsemani. What do you see when Judas and the
armed men arrive to apprehend Jesus? What
do you hear and smell? What do you
make of this guy named Peter, who tries to defend Jesus with a sword, then
denies him three times? Later
perhaps you find yourself among the mob at Jesus’s trial.
How do you feel being there among them?
Are you frightened for yourself as Peter had become?
Perhaps the eyes of Jesus fall upon you.
How do you respond to his gaze?
If
we are truly using our imagination, do we see something of ourselves in Peter?
In Pilate, who knows what is the right thing to do but opts for
expediency? What about those
soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross? Are
they sadistic or just poor blokes doing their job?
Do we see ourselves in them?
At
this point, we might think of some people who probably never heard of Ignatius
but who entered into scripture in much the same way.
We all are familiar with the spirituals “Go Down Moses” and
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Sometimes it causes me to tremble.”
Those black slaves had to be doing something very Ignatian to generate
such songs.
Suppose we were there when they crucified our Lord -- perhaps at the foot of the cross, in the company of the three women. There, we might do some connecting, another use of the imagination, very much as the early Christian writers made connections with the Hebrew scriptures -- Jesus with the suffering servant of Isaiah. We might recall that this very Jesus suspended on the cross, recently gave a vision of the Last Judgment, saying to the elect, many of whom were caught by surprise, “I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty and you gave me drink, in prison and you visited me, . . .” Jesus goes on to tell those “blessed of my Father,” that “Whatever you have done to the least of my brothers and sisters you have done unto me.” Can we, seated there at the foot of the cross, see in the countenance of the crucified Christ all of suffering humanity? And, perhaps more important, can we go out into the world and see in the face of the homeless man asking for food, the condemned man asking for mercy, or our own betrayer asking forgiveness, the countenance of the crucified Christ?