Homily for Good Friday 2008
It is Good Friday.*
The church is mostly dark,
though sometimes the sun breaks through the clouds
and bathes the space in streaks of warm sunlight.
A sense of accustomed shock hangs in the air,
as if we are waiting for a storm.
I kneel and then lie prostrate on the floor,
putting my hands in front of my face.
I think of Christ, of the death of Christ.
We are here to acknowledge the presence of suffering among us.
We are here to acknowledge are own inevitable deaths.
We are here to say that we know about death,
that we know about loss, that it will not surprise us.
But, of course, it will surprise us;
it surprised even Christ in the garden.
I come here because I want to hear the words spoken:
the words about the Suffering Servant from Isaiah,
the words from the letter to the Hebrews,
and then the words of John.
I want to hear the story read aloud with you.
There is senseless suffering,
suffering that we read about every day in the newspaper,
or hear about on CNN or KARE 11.
The words we hear together draw us into the words of the prophet,
haunting and spell binding in its description
of the suffering of so many.
We wish that Jesus had eliminated suffering
as well as death, or maybe instead of death.
But that is not how the non-violent reign of God
comes into the world.
For reasons that only God completely understands,
this fundamental part of the creation cannot be jerry-rigged.
Jesus was, by all accounts,
willing to submit himself to the unknown.
He was willing to step into the darkness
without having to understand it, simply for love of us.
He was willing to sacrifice his life for love of us.
There is also a challenge in this love that we see revealed in the cross
and our awareness of suffering in our world.
The cross of Jesus challenges us to be aware of the suffering
that we cause individually and as a nation by our actions.
The war in Iraq has now been going for five years
and has claimed the lives of 4000 American soldiers
and a minimum of 89,000 Iraqi civilians.
This does not begin to count those who are maimed for life,
or who have lost their loved ones and way of life.
The suffering is enormous.
How did this happen?
The cross of Jesus calls us to reflect on war
and the reasons that we will accept for going to war.
It calls on us to have better baloney detectors.
The witness of Jesus on the cross embodies another imagination,
the imagination of God and that is where we need to be.
Hearing the passion accounts on Sunday and today,
we are aware of the use of torture against Jesus:
spitting, mocking, the crown of thorns, sleep deprivation,
dehydration, whipping and tearing his flesh,
not to mention the manner of death.
I believe that as Christian people
we must resist our government's use of techniques of torture
in the war against terror.
The cross of Jesus tells us that this cannot be the right path,
that our society, our life together, has to be grounded
in a fundamental respect for persons, even enemy persons.
What can the Gospel mean if it doesn't mean that?
Finally, the love of Jesus on the cross challenges us
to entrust ourselves to the Father in our darkest moments,
especially as we face our own death,
to entrust ourselves to a God who has gone there before us
because this God draws sense out of senselessness,
hope out of hopelessness,
victory out of defeat,
life out of death.
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
21 March 2008
--
*Mary Gordon, Final Payments (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 292-294
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