Good Friday

One of the most disturbing paintings of the crucifixion scene is by Mathias Grunewald, Jesus is depicted in terrible pain which is expressed in the twisted mangled body of Christ nailed to the cross. The figure of Christ towers over the other figures of Mary and John on his right, Mary of Magdala on her knees, and John the Baptist on his left. Christ seams heavy, his body weighted down by the plethora of wounds covering him head to toe. Grunewald used the medieval tradition of painting varying the size of the characters depending on their importance, and thus Christ is shown larger than the others. Grunewald's vivid and horrific look at the crucifixion reveals a meditation on just how much Christ took upon himself for our redemption. As Isaiah said: “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases... Wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”

For thousands of years the Church has used images and paintings, icons and statues to depict the life of Christ. It has been one of the great teaching tools She used to proclaim the faith over the centuries. But the crucifix, it seams to me, while central to the redemption story, is the hardest image to look upon, but look upon it we must! The church even gives us this day to commemorate this most brutal act. Fulton Sheen states that the reason it is hard is because people today want Christ without the cross, we want heaven with out the effort to get there, with out sacrifice. We want the happy Jesus he says, while other ideologies claiming to build heaven on earth without God claim the cross without Christ. Marxism, communism, and any human ideology ends up leaving us only in the burden of the Cross without receiving the sought after good: redemption. Only Christ on the cross does God’s sacrifice make sense.

“They shall look upon him, whom they have pierced.” States the evangilist. It is God's love for us that we see when we look upon Christ on the cross. This is another reason why it is so difficult to keep our eyes on Him. In our desensitized violent culture another dead human form seams like nothing much to behold. But Christ is different because in his raised body on the Cross, it is his raised over abundant love for humanity that we see. This is why we have a hard time to keep our eyes fixed on him. Because before the cross we are small, we do not love like he does, we do not give as he does. Pope Benedict states: “It is in the mystery of the Cross that the overwhelming power of the heavenly Father’s mercy is revealed in all its fullness. In order to win back the love of His creature, He accepted to pay a very high price: the blood of his only begotten Son... on the Cross, it is God Himself who begs the love of his creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us.

What marks us as Christians though, is the fact that we too are configured to Christ crucified by our common baptism. We are called to bear the cross within us, and say with St Paul: "if I boast of anything, I boast in Christ and him crucified" that one day we too can say with him,"it is no longer I that live but Christ who lives in me." Only through the cross can we learn the humility necessary to hand our life over to Jesus, who was able to conquer death. As st John says: "if we have died with him we shall also live with him."