Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:
We are now entering into the most solemn time of the Church’s liturgical year: the Easter Triduum, the celebration of the paschal mystery of Jesus’ suffering, dying and rising, wherein Jesus’ redemptive act of love on the cross saved us from sin, reconciled us with God, and gave us the promise of eternal life.
Today, on Good Friday, we focus in a particular way on Jesus’ passion and death. We are now so familiar with these scriptural accounts that we sometimes fail to appreciate how deeply Jesus suffered, the loneliness He must have felt as his disciples slept through his agony in the Garden, the enormous weight He felt in accepting God’s will, the pain of betrayal and seeing His disciples flee, His scourging and crowning with thorns, the nailing of His flesh onto wooden beams, and His feelings of abandonment on the cross. Sometimes we think that His divinity somehow spared Him of this suffering. It did not. And yet, Jesus did not avoid suffering, but embraced it, in obedience to the Father, and out of love for you and me and all God’s people.
Pope Benedict XVI, when he was prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in God in the World that despite the tendency in today’s society to want to eliminate suffering at all costs, it is a fundamental and unavoidable reality. “Pain is part of being human,” he said. “Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice.”
Love through self-sacrifice. This is the means through which our redemption and reconciliation with God were accomplished. It is also the way that we, as followers of Jesus, become truly human and the people that we are meant to be. As the then Cardinal Ratzinger said, we must allow ourselves to be taken out of our “comfortable tranquility” and allow ourselves to be “reshaped” by going out of ourselves in order to mature and grow.
The Body of Christ, the Church, is suffering today. Young and old, we thirst for truth and meaning in life. We thirst for a deeper relationship with God and each other. Jesus tells us, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.” (Jn 7:37) And yet, we have left Jesus alone in the Garden for long periods of time and no longer know Him very well. Some say they are searching, but can’t find Him in our churches. Others have left Him completely.
When Jesus reached Golgotha, the place of his crucifixion, the soldiers there offered Him bitter wine mixed with myrrh, a common sedative of the day. Matthew’s gospel tells us that when Jesus tasted it, He refused to drink it, despite His great thirst, perhaps not wanting to dull the pain He knew He was to endure for our sake.
In our own time, we, the Body of Christ, thirst. Regrettably, though, we too often are seduced by a culture that offers us the illusion that it can quench this thirst. Yet, our culture’s cure for our thirst is one of sour wine and myrrh, an elixir of false promises and false hopes. Sadly, we drink it down, so numbed that we do not even fully realize what we are missing by giving up Jesus, who alone can satisfy our deepest longings.
The result? Rather than becoming more united to God, we have a growing lack of belief. Rather than growing in love and the self-sacrifice it entails, we become driven by self-interest. Rather than forming deeper, more personal relationships, we become isolated by technology that keeps us separated by miles and miles of fiber optic cable. Rather than bridging differences, we accentuate them through political and theological partisanship and shrill invective that demonizes those whose thinking is different than our own. Rather than achieving greater communion, we perpetuate differences based on race and class even in our own diocese that separate neighbor from neighbor and divide the Body of Christ. We think we have achieved comfort and some measure of success, but when we’re really honest, we realize we are unfulfilled and empty, falling short of the people we are called to be.
The Body of Christ, the Church of South Jersey, is entering into a time of challenge and change. We do not change for the sake of change. We change so that we may have new life. We change for the sake of more dynamic, more vibrant parish communities of faith, hope and love wherein we come to know and love Jesus more deeply, so much so that Jesus lives in us and is revealed in us as we serve one another in His name. In short, we change so that we can become more closely and more deeply united to Jesus and His mission.
New life in Jesus and reshaping ourselves more completely in His image and likeness surely make it worth leaving our zones of “comfortable tranquility.” Nonetheless, the change that is ahead for the Church of South Jersey, where we will have fewer parishes and new models of parish configuration, inevitably will involve self-sacrifice, suffering, pain, uncertainty, and a great sense of loss over what was. Leaving the comfort of the status quo is sometimes frightening, even when we know that something better lies ahead. We may want to retreat or scatter, as the disciples did when faced with the events of Good Friday. And yet, we keep our focus fixed firmly on Jesus, who is the reason we change. We unite ourselves more closely to each other and to Jesus, who, with His Spirit, will guide us on this journey of faith.
Jesus Himself assures us that Good Friday is not the end: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve but your grief will become joy. When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived; but when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy that a child has been born into the world. So you also are now in anguish. But I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice.” (Jn 16:20-22). Our hearts rejoice and we never lose hope because we know that when suffering is embraced for Jesus’ sake and when it is united to His own suffering, we have the promise of new life. As St. Paul tells us, “If we have died with Him, we shall also live with Him.” (2 Tim 2:11).
As we make our quiet exit from our churches on Good Friday afternoon, we are comforted by the knowledge that the height of the Easter Triduum still lies ahead. We know that the light of the Easter candle at the Saturday night Vigil will cut through the darkness and sorrow of Good Friday, as we joyously proclaim the words of the Exsultet:
Exult, all creation around God’s throne.
God bless you.