LENTEN REFLECTION

At Passover, the Priests brought out the bread of the presence also known as the bread of the face of God, together with the wine, on the table, and holding it aloft to the gathered congregation, announced, Bold God’s love for you; commemorating God’s care for the people in the wilderness during the Exodus and over the years. On Holy Thursday, as we mark the institution of the Eucharist. The bread and wine of the presence now find fulfilment in the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ as God’s Love for us. And today on Good Friday, as our Lord is lifted up on the Cross, we look up to Him and He says to us, Behold God’s Love for you.  

We can pray and ponder may things today, in total sorrow. We can offer all these prayers and questions to God, and we can join our own sorrow to that of our Lord, who suffers a horrendous death, of the worst pain and humiliation that the Roman empire could think of and devise at the time; the crucifixion. And as we listen to the Passion narrative, we can be struck by how gross human folly can be in doing precisely the wrong things instead of the right thing. We participate in this folly. Lent has been a time for total conversion away from our folly and from all folly. We pray for ourselves and for the whole of creation to permanently and forever live lives of total conversion to God. We pray in sorrow but equally in gratitude to God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, seeking to emulate as our models our Lady the Great Mother of God Mother Most Holy, and the Martyrs and Saints, and seeking to be fully mapped to our Lord Jesus Christ.  

We are created good and participate in the Good, who is God Himself. We desire the Good. We feel and know this at the core of our being. But often we rebel by choosing to do what we would not have others do to us; we rebel against God. We know that we flourish in communities of love, in a civilisation of love, but we rebel and participate in hatred and all sorts of sin that harms us. Good Friday is the day to be struck by the wrong choices we have made over the millennia as humankind, and in our lives as individuals; but equally to be struck by the God’s intervention through His mighty deeds in history and in our lives up to this moment; to gratefully wonder at God’s love. He never abandons us. He does not hold anything back in pursuing us, to restore us into His love; to make us right before Him, reconciling us to Himself and to one another.     

Through the incarnation and the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, God participates in human suffering. He becomes family and we become family with Him. He gives us the Holy Spirit, who lives in us. This is the intimacy with Him that God would us to know and live. When we are in the midst of suffering, we do well to remember that God is with us, at every moment and always until the end of time. Evil does not have the last word; it is good that has the last word. And when we join our Lord Jesus Christ in praying Psalm 22, we do well to pray it up to end. Traditionally, a document was known by its first few words; there were no titles as such. Intoning the first few words referred to and meant the entire document. Our Lord prayed all of Psalm 22, including vv.26-31:

• The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord.     May your hearts live forever!
• All the ends of the earth shall remember

    and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations     shall worship before him. ²⁸ For dominion belongs to the Lord,     and he rules over the nations.

²⁹ To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;     before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,     and I shall live for him. ³⁰ Posterity will serve him;     future generations will be told about the Lord, ³¹ and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,     saying that he has done it

An inevitable question on Good Friday is why did Jesus die, why did He have to die; or an initial rendition is, why did the Jewish authorities have Jesus crucified? The Passion narrative gives us the answer: the vices of the Jewish authorities and Pilate, including pride particularly self-righteousness and false reasoning, jealousy and envy at Jesus’s works and popularity, gluttony and greed for the wealth from the temple economy, fear and insecurity of Pilate and the Sanhedrin – all of which we must expunge from our hearts and our lives. But all that this vividly shows is that at our worst as humankind, in all our failing and rebellion, God intervenes and works our overall good, our salvation. Evil does not have the last word. It is an imposter and a bully in our lives, and when we remain in the Lord, we realise how it is totally powerless to destroy us; we emerge ever stronger. Jesus died, was buried, and rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and into the world, manifesting the Church, which continues to storm evil and overcome it, and the gates of hades have no power to stop Church (Mt 16:18). The Easter Triduum is one event. It is not just Good Friday; Holy Saturday and Easter Vigil are integral to it.  

The Passion, Crucifixion, Death, Burial and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ was a cosmic event. It was in accordance with and in fulfilment of Scripture, as we read in the servant songs (Isa 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-9, 52:13-53:12), and as Jesus explained to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-35). It is the culmination of human history; for Jesus recapitulated or re-lived all history, for instance as we see in the genealogies and in the temptations (Lk 3:23-4:14), and launched the eschatology or the beginning of the Kingdom of God which is already present but will reach its full manifestation (Lk 17:21; Mt 25:31-46)). Jesus brought God, as Pope Benedict XVI concludes in his trilogy Jesus of Nazareth. However, the Passion and Crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ must never be seen as appeasement of an angry God. It was God’s way of showing us His love, within the overall salvation history of all humankind.   

A related question is, why is there evil in the world? These questions have troubled philosophers and theologians alike over the millennia. And many have lost their Faith or chosen to be atheists because they conclude that God is bad, and not God at all, for allowing suffering in the world. Others have chosen to handle this question like Job, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6), after attentively listening to God’s questions in 38:1-42:34 about His transcendence as the Creator. Qoheleth in the Book of Ecclesiastes, examines and laments the total emptiness of everything, and his advice in the end is, “Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone” (12:13). He also has some practical advice in 9:7-10:  

⁷ Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. ⁸ Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. ⁹ Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. ¹⁰ Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

Human knowledge seems at best to answer the problem of suffering and evil by indicating that there is that part that we cause ourselves by what we do to ourselves and to others, for instance when we hate and commit violence or neglect those in need or destroy the environment, leading to climate change disasters. Then there is natural evil, such as earthquakes, or physical laws that make life inherently difficult; “Life is Difficult” is the first sentence of Scott M Peck’s book The Road Less Travelled. Scott is not a doomsayer but provides pathways for a rewarding live, recommending discipline, lifeskills and delaying of gratification, among others. Or faced with diseases that also afflict innocent children, Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, explains how life has a certain randomness about it and shares his anger and his healing process. Besides the beauty and grandeur of creation which is so nurturing, we see also a world in a process of becoming, of journeying; there is still a lot for us to do as God’s stewards of the natural world and creation (Gn 2:15). Were there to be nothing more for us to do, life would not be worth living, as experiments have shown. The state of the world and the challenge of the human condition are therefore characterbuilding for each and every one of us, so we become ever more fully human, with our Lord Jesus Christ as our model, as the perfect human who reveals to humankind what it is to be human (Gaudium et Spes, 22). Existentialism urges us to step forward and decide to make meaning in our lives, and do it, as this is the most we can do given that we find ourselves here on earth. A three-step process can help: what is the ideal reality I would like to see, what do I enjoy doing and what skills do I have, how can I deploy what I enjoy doing and my skills towards achieving that ideal world? Or what is the greatest need in my community and the world at large that would be my greatest joy to assist with?   

Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Light of the World, and teaches us that He came that we may have life in abundance (Jn 10:10), to make His home with us if we live in Him (14:23, 15:4), have complete joy (Jn 15:11), and have eternal life beginning here on earth (Jn 17:3); “³ And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” 17:3). We have Scripture as eyewitness testimony that we may believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son, and have life in His Name (Jn 20:31). However, when we do this, we run into opposed forces, which we are to overcome not solely by our own efforts but by joining our Lord Jesus Christ in His mission of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth (Jn 12:31, 16:33). We have a role to play; that is our dignity for we are made in God’s image. Jesus sends out into the world to continue His teaching and healing ministry (Mk 16:15, Mt 28:16-20, Acts 1:8). As a definitional and practical matter, we appreciate the good more fully, when we have acutely experienced or seen the bad. But in God’s presence, and in communion with Him, we have the perfect good. Jesus is the light of the world (Jn 8:12), the way, the truth and the life (Jn 14:6).