Good Friday of the
Lord’s Passion
Celebration of the
Passion of the Lord
Dear brothers and sisters,
Back
on Ash Wednesday, none of us could have foreseen our present circumstances which
have kept us from gathering at the altar of the Lord and even from venerating
his Cross together today. In some ways it seems as though the world has grown
cold, and not simply because of the return of the less pleasant temperatures.
On
this Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion, it feels as though our hearts have
grown perhaps a bit cooler than we should like to admit. As we contemplate the
death of Christ Jesus for our salvation, how can we not see the many ways we
fail to follow his example of love? Every time we withdraw from him, we step
away from the fire of his love and our hearts grow colder (cf. Hebrews 12:29).
The
ashes which were placed on our heads at the beginning of Lent came from the
palms we carried the previous Palm Sunday. We carried those palms to commemorate
the Lord’s entrance into his holy city of Jerusalem; we carried them to pledge
our allegiance to him and to show our willingness to allow him to rule over every
aspect of our lives. But because we are weak and sinful, we burned those palms,
remembering both our failed promises and his mercy, and used their ashes as a
sign of repentance to show our desire to draw closer to the Lord, to step away
from our sinfulness into the warmth of his love.
One
of the famed lines of poetry in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
comes from the Hobbit Bilbo, who composed these words: “From the ashes a fire
shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring.”[1]
Anyone who has stoked fading embers or raked coals knows what this means, that
even from dying ashes a fire can indeed arise. However cold our hearts may have
become, however distant from the Lord we may have moved, if we draw near to him
he can cause the fire of his love to awaken within us again.
If
we turn our attention for a moment to Saint Francis of Assisi, we find an
example of what this means for us. In his youth, he was more concerned with
worldly pleasures and the enjoyment of the company of his friends and the
esteem of others, than he was with the things of God. But after his conversion,
Saint Bonaventure tells that “Christ Jesus Crucified was laid, as a bundle of
myrrh, in his heart’s bosom, and [Francis] yearned to be utterly transformed
into [Christ] by the fire of his exceeding love.”[2]
On this Good
Friday, Mother Church invites us to contemplate the image of Crucified Love and,
like Saint Francis, to receive Christ into our hearts that we, too, might allow
“the power of his love [to sear] through us like a flame, enabling us to become
totally ourselves and thus totally of God.”[3]
We are invited today to look upon the greatness of the Lord’s love for us and
to consider in what ways our love fails to respond adequately to his.
This is something
we do not like to do very often. We know that our love is not yet like the Lord’s.
We know we fail to love God and neighbor in very many ways, both large and small.
Yet the remembrance of our weak love is always also a reminder of the greatness
his love. However cold our hearts may have grown, however far from the Lord we
may have moved, he always desires to stir up the fading ashes of our dwindling
love into a great and blazing fire able to transform the world.
For this reason,
Saint Augustine said, “Our love, like a fire, must take hold of what is nearest
and then spread to what is further off.”[4]
What is nearest to us if not the love of God? Who is nearest to us if not
Christ Jesus himself? Indeed, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves.[5]
Let us, then, this day, draw near to his Cross. Let us take hold of it and
carry it with us to every aspect of our lives so that the fire of the Lord’s
love may warm every heart. Amen.
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship
of the Ring: Being the First Part of the Lord of the Rings (Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994), 167.
[2] Saint Bonaventure, The Life of
St. Francis, 9.2.
[3] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi,
47.
[4] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Ten Homilies on I John, 8.1. In Thomas
C. Oden, et al, eds., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture,
New Testament Vol. XI: James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude (Downers Grove,
Illinois: Inter Varsity Press, 2000), 214).
[5] Cf. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions,
3.6.11.
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