(Good Friday 2023: This homily was given on April 7, 2023 at St.
Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani. Read Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 31:2-15;
Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Good Friday 2023]
In Jewish homes during the Passover meal, the youngest
member of the family asks his or her father the question, “Why is this night
different from all other nights?” The
father responds by telling the story of the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt—the
story of how God delivered his chosen people from slavery to Pharoah and the
Egyptians, and led them to freedom through the Red Sea.
Today, as Christians, we might ask ourselves a similar
question: Why is this day, Good Friday, different from every other day? And our answer would have to be similar
to that of the Jewish father at Passover: It’s because today we celebrate
our deliverance from slavery. But
not from slavery to a person or a nation, but rather slavery to something far
more consequential. I’m talking about slavery to evil, slavery to sin. That’s what the crucifixion of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ is all about: the loving act of a God who cares about us so
much that he was willing to go to any length to free us from sin and eternal
death, and to bring us back to himself.
You see the truth of the matter is that we deserved to be on
that cross, not Jesus. He never
sinned. We’re the sinners. The Good Thief recognized this when he said
to the thief on the left, “We are only paying the price for what we’ve
done. We deserve this. But this man has done nothing wrong.”
Yet Jesus was willing to take our place—to do what only a
God-man could do, namely atone for the sins of the entire human race. And that, my brothers and sisters, is a lot
of sin. As Isaiah put it:
It was our infirmities he bore, our sufferings that he endured…. Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed. We had all gone astray like sheep, each following his own way. But the Lord laid upon him the guilt of us all.
Only a God-man—only a divine Person—could bear the psychological
and spiritual weight of all that guilt (for us mere mortals the guilt of our
own sins alone can be overwhelming!)—which is why the agony the Jesus
experienced on the Cross was far more intense than anything we will ever experience
in our earthly lives.
The closest we can come to understanding what our Lord
endured on the Cross is to reflect on our own experience of intense pain. (This is something I learned from Bishop
Sheen many years ago. When something
tragic happens in our lives (like the death of someone we love) we normally don’t
only experience the pain of the present moment.
What we tend to do when we suffer great physical or emotional pain is to
unconsciously take all the pain from our past and add that to the pain of the
present moment. Job did this when in the
midst of his affliction he cried out, “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?”
Well, if you know the story from the Old Testament, you know
that Job’s life before he was afflicted was not a drudgery! It was anything but a drudgery. It was wonderful. He had it all! He had a loving family; he had his health; he
had many possessions. But at that
moment, in the midst of his present pain, all he could remember from his past
were the bad things.
And, as if this were not enough, the other thing we tend to
do when we’re in pain is to look forward in time and anticipate all the bad
that might happen to us in the future.
Job also did this when he cried out, “I shall not see happiness
again.” So all this real pain from our
past, and all the anticipated pain of the future are brought to the present
moment, and they magnify the pain that we are already suffering.
That is our experience—and from it we can gain some small
insight into what our Lord went through on that Cross. Jesus said in John’s Gospel that when he was
lifted up from the earth he would draw all people to himself. All people, of all times. That means that on
Calvary Jesus reached back in time and took upon himself every sin of every
person who had ever lived, from Adam onward.
And, as if this were not enough, at the same time he reached forward
into history, and took hold of all the sin and evil that would be committed in the
future until the end of time (including your sin and mine) and pulled all of
that onto himself. So on the Cross he
bore the weight of all sin: past, present and future. That was something only he could do. He could do it because he was a divine Person
who also had a human nature.
He brought all those sins to the Cross to die for them. And this was no ordinary death; it was death
by crucifixion. Crucifixion was such a
horrid means of capital punishment that Rome would not execute her own citizens
in this way. No Roman citizen was ever
crucified. Crucifixion was the form of
execution that was reserved for slaves, for people the Romans considered to be
“scum”—for the dregs of society.
And it was a slow and painful death. Historians tell us that some people hung on
the cross for almost a week (that’s why Pilate was surprised that Jesus had
died so soon). Sometimes they suffered
to the point of madness.
It was also a humiliating death, because the person was
crucified naked. You know, we always
portray our Lord as being covered by a cloth—we do that for the sake of
propriety. But in actuality he was
crucified naked. This is the type of
death and humiliation he endured for us.
This means that he understands our sufferings. He knows them well, because he’s experienced
them himself. Does God know what it’s
like, for example, to have a headache?
Yes, he knows what it’s like to have a headache—he wore a crown of
thorns. Does God know what it’s like to
have a backache? Yes, he carried a tree
to the place of his execution. Does God know
what it’s like to be abandoned by friends and betrayed? Yes, he knows what that’s like too. He knows it all because he suffered it all on
Calvary.
And he went through it all for our benefit, so that we might
be freed from our sins and come to experience the fullness of life. As St. Paul put it in his Letter to the
Romans, by the power that flows from our Lord’s suffering and death we don’t
have to live our lives as slaves to fear, slaves to hate, slaves to lust, slaves
to sin or evil in any of its forms. Of
course, as we all know, much of the world right now is living in bondage to
those things. But we don’t have to, if
we turn to Jesus in sincere faith and seek his strength and power—because he
conquered all those evil forces by his death 2,000 years ago.
That’s why I would say that Good Friday is not a day to be
sad. It’s a day to be thankful! Thankful for how much the Lord loves each one
of us, and thankful for what he was willing to endure for us, to free us from
sin and give us the hope of eternal happiness and joy with him. As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews
put it, “For the sake of the joy which lay before him, Christ
endured the Cross, heedless of its shame.”
That same joy is to be ours as well, if we are
faithful—which is (or at least should be) good news for us. It should also be good news for every other
man and woman living on planet earth right now—as well as for every other man
and woman who will live on planet earth in the future, until the end of time.
Which is precisely why today is known as (and will always be
known as) Good Friday.
