Good Friday 2006

These moving words penned by Father Faber have been part of my Holy Week as long as I can remember. I sang them during Lent when I was a child and they have always carried particular significance for me. Our choir sang them as a meditation on the scene at Calvary: Mary at the cross, beckoning us to mourn with her. We know Jesus crucified, and know Him best, when contemplated through the eyes, the heart, and the sorrows of Holy Mary.

The final line of this stanza forms a refrain for the whole poem from which these lines have been taken: "Jesus our Love is crucified" (the ‘l’ of love here is capitalized). There is a special kind of sorrow that attends Good Friday, one which is unique, I think, in all human experience. There is no doubt that the Church is in mourning this day; it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The emptiness of the Eucharist from the tabernacle, the prayers and posture of the liturgy pointing to death and grief, the absence of the organ, bells and incense–these and other things are meant to heighten our awareness of the heavy-hearted spirit of this day. But, once again, the feeling and mental disposition that we are meant to experience is something distinctive. When, by contrast, we learn of the death of a loved one, there’s a sorrow and a suffering that seizes the heart, making it stop momentarily. This sensible physical reaction is due to the shock that a definitive separation of persons must henceforth take place. The very vital thing that links persons mentally, spiritually, together is what we call love, and it is that very thing, living love, which is broken and interrupted by death. The beloved is gone, absent as one who can no longer be embraced in love. (This, by the way, needs to be interjected here: contrary to the mistaken idea that one might gather from a hasty reading of a romance-tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet, lovers are not forever united after death in some fanciful and idyllic place beyond. Neither, I might add, would Shakespeare have intended his audience to deduce such a silly thing. After death, there is the judgment and heaven, purgatory, or hell; and those who foolishly kill themselves for the sake of human love can only expect eternal misery in the next life. But I offer that commentary only as an illustrative aside.)

Here we have come to participate in the memorial of the Lord’s death. But why is there is no mourning here? Why no tears; why no sobbing? If the answer be given that His death was so long ago that one can no longer grieve over it, it will not do. It will not do because the Church wants us to remember the death of our beloved Jesus and because His is a death unlike that of any other. Why is this so? It is because whenever we love someone, we must will to love. Love is an act of our souls; but we ourselves are not love. We produce love from our hearts but we are not love itself.

With Jesus it is different. Jesus is God, and God is Love. Jesus then is Love become man. In the sacred humanity of Jesus, from His first moment of repose in the womb of his Mother until His resting in the sepulcher, divinity is in the flesh of Jesus. Even after His death, God remained in the body of Jesus. But Jesus is God and God is Love. Therefore, when His soul left His body (which is what we mean by death), Love did not separate from His corpse. His dead body did not begin to decay in the tomb because divinity sustained it: Love was there. Nothing could ever separate us from the love of Christ (cf. Rm 8:39), not even His death! Rightly does our poem say that ‘Jesus our Love is crucified!’ If we have any tears for Jesus they are not because of a separation due to death but rather because our sins inflicted the pain in His heart, His head, and all of His body and soul and because these caused His death. We have wounded His love, but we could not conquer or defeat it, not even by killing Him. Since God is Love, the love of Jesus cannot be annihilated.

Romeo and Juliet (pardon my mention of this again, but only to make my point) is truly a tragedy because theirs was an egotistical kind of love, one which ended in eternal separation. They had wanted to love as only God can love; they wanted to be love itself. They confused physical intoxication with what can only be found in God: ecstacy. Only God is Love, and therefore His love only is immortal; it cannot end through death.

Is it not this that makes our celebration of the Lord’s death a wholly special kind of mourning? We, like Holy Mary standing at the foot of the cross, are not doubled over in grief. Is there sorrow? Indeed, intense sorrow! But not that aching absence that occurs when death separates us from our beloved.

"Jesus our Love is crucified!" Crucified Love is utter purity and selflessness. It is not blemished by any concern over the personal cost of suffering that it required to win our souls for God; nor is it a delusory self love that masks itself as noble.

Good Friday is our way of attempting to compensate in part for our poor record in loving God. Our love is necessarily weak and narrow and, due to a nature that has suffered a fall, engrossed with itself. That’s a most unfortunate condition which is not only at the root of all our sins, but which stunts our love for God for His own sake, cools our affection for Christ, and limits our appreciation that perfect goodness and generosity which motivated His painful agony and death.

Only the love of the Virgin Mother was truly worthy of Christ. It is she then who teaches us to love Him by her perfect charity. Because there is no reserve in her charity, no thought of herself, that Mary rightfully "calls us to her side" at the cross. Christian love that is worthy of the name is pure, like her love for Christ. And, like her love, it flows out of the divine source which is the Heart of Jesus. It’s foolish to claim that it doesn’t really matter whom we love so long as we love someone. It does matter because love is always relative to a person: love can’t be abstracted from the person one loves. The purity of our hearts consists in and comes from loving Jesus crucified. If we could love Him totally, we would be pure and immaculate, like Mary. We hope to become immaculate in heaven, but on earth this is something that we can only strive for.

When we come forward to venerate the cross on Good Friday we will approach as if ascending to Calvary, drawn by what we know will be found waiting for us there: the Mother of sorrows standing under the cross and pointing to the single instance of that Love which of itself cannot fail, cannot disappoint, cannot come to an end–even in death–since there.....

Jesus, our Love is crucified.