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LITURGY OF THE DAY, GOOD FRIDAY, Year C: April 2 2010

In the account of the Gospel of Mark, the last words of Jesus is the opening line of Psalm 22 — Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani?: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

In that piercing cry, loud and desperate, God empties Himself in order to restore Himself again. In His nakedness on the cross, without any hope of relief, Jesus is abandoned, God is absent, the darkness has overcome the One who promised us everything. The words of Henri de Lubac come back again, The universal Man died alone^<1>. He was abandoned. Humanity's joy is overshadowed by the Cross.

We don't understand where we are. Our nakedness and vulnerability is just too unbearable to live with. It seems that there is no place to find relief. Again the words of Henri de Lubac:

'It is not always a good thing to take refuge too soon in the Bosom of God. This running away may conceal a secret pride, or the avid search for an anaesthetic. The person who suffers has the finest opportunity of bringing the law of Christian life into effect: let him not be ashamed of resembling and having recourse to the Man of Sorrows'².

Man, continues de Lubac, may be 'divided, torn, unbalanced even: should one call him happy if he were not?'³.

The wood of the Cross which we behold literally tears the humanity and the divinity of God apart. For a small moment, Jesus Himself in a very metaphysical sense becomes unbalanced. The death of the Man must forcibly suggest that Christ was emptied of his Humanity. Does this mean that the divine abandoned Him? De Lubac suggests so. We can perhaps call on the words of St Paul's letter to the Philippians here, in order to pursue an extended, or slightly unusual slant on the theory of God-in-Christ's 'self-emptying' or in Greek kenosis.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, he humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross⁴.

We might suggest that in order for humanity to be forever restored to God, in order for us to be assured of our divine destiny, the person of Jesus had to be emptied — the person of Jesus had to die and in some sense be abandoned by God in order for us to come to terms with our own nakedness, vulnerability and in order to understand our own self worth more fully. But the only way we can cope with that is through our knowledge that Easter is not far away; the light shines in a small chink at the end of the tunnel.

In life, it is no fiction to say that our self-image is distorted. Our self-image is dysmorphic. Our view in the mirror is not as it should be. But today we look at Jesus, that beautiful figure on the cross, with His arms outstretched for us. The outstretched arms are a promise of love, of mercy, of acceptance of who we are and what we are. We come to kiss the feet of the crucified Saviour, and in that harsh reality, we are at once restored, healed, made whole again. Our nakedness has been covered with the blanket of love and our vulnerability has been overshadowed by the divine nakedness, the pure vision of God's love and desire for the human heart to love Him. Our pain has been wiped away by the self-emptying of Jesus, in order for the light to burst forth again. And so we approach the cross, with our metaphorical nakedness, all our layers confidently cast aside and we join with everyone else, resolute and proud of who we are.

Some words from Professor Sarah Coakley which I borrow in order for us to focus on our own meditation of the veneration of the Cross:

"The paradox of power and vulnerability" is I believe uniquely focused in the act of silent waiting on the divine in prayer.⁵

It is then, through our nakedness — and Christ's, in our silence and in our focus upon the Cross and the Man of Sorrows who hangs there, that our vulnerability can become self-confidence, our weakness become resolute self-control and power, our hopelessness become abandoned to the joy and hope of the everlasting love of God.

¹de Lubac, Henri (trans.), Catholicism: Christ and the Common destiny of Man, Ignatius Press, (1950), pp367–369.
²de Lubac, Henri, Paradoxes of Faith, Ignatius Press.
³Ibid.
⁴Philippians 2:5–11.
⁵Coakley, S. Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, Oxford: Blackwell (2002).