O DEARLY, DEARLY HAS HE LOVED..............

A reflection for GOOD FRIDAY  

The church is quiet and bare. The altar is exposed. The sacred ministers enter in silence and prostrate themselves. The passion of John is read. The cross is venerated. The choir sings the Reproaches. We are fed with the pre-sanctified bread and we slip away.

 What does it all mean? The best thing is to concentrate on just one image: the shocking sight of a young man in the prime of life hanging in agony by the weight of nails hammered into his wrists and feet, left to slowly choke to death.

 What could be “good” about it? What was special or unique about it? There have been plenty of other ugly and cruel judicial murders of innocent victims in the history of the world. 

Well, we have come with hindsight, in the dazzling light of the Resurrection and Ascension, to the awful realisation that on this occasion it was the Son of God, the word made flesh, who was put to death, the word which, according to St.John, in the beginning was with God and was God.

 And the young man in the prime of life – that word made flesh – declared more than once that “the Father and I are one.” They were indivisible, two persons of one substance in the Holy Trinity.

 So the first thing to understand about the crucifixion is the indissoluble bond between the Father and His beloved Son, a fusion of identity which makes it impossible to distance the Father from the Son at this terrible moment.

Just what this terrible event is really all about hit me dramatically when I first saw Durer’s painting “The adoration of the Trinity” a copy of which hangs in the hallway of my house.

Durer shows Christ dying on the cross but it is a highly unconventional crucifixion scene because, peering out from just above the vertical plank of the cross, a few inches away from Christ’s drooping head, is the face of an old man with a long beard and a sort of coronet like the ones worn by Orthodox patriarchs. And a few inches again above him is a white dove hovering with wings spread.

 The imagery is perhaps a bit crude  but what it seeks to represent is the most earth-shattering truth and precious hope for us all. THE WHOLE TRINITY IS THERE, AT THE CROSS. THE FATHER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT ARE NOT SOMEWHERE ELSE. THEY ARE IN THE THICK OF IT, SHARING THE SON’S SUFFERING. 

Durer could almost have painted nails driven into the Father’s forehead and into the Spirit’s wings. 

The painting is says it all. It makes everything fall into place. The whole story of the incarnation.

 When Our Lord came down from heaven to live among us, He tried and tried again to show us the true values of the kingdom of heaven, or, simply, what the God of the Holy Trinity is really like.  

Tragically, He was viewed with suspicion and then hostility, misunderstood, rejected and in the end was killed for His pains. 

But this ultimate sacrifice actually accomplished its purpose. To go so far as to kill the Son of God was the WORST THING humanity could do. And to allow Himself to be killed was the BEST THING the Son of God could do to convince us of God’s love.

And He succeeded. Tetelestai (Greek). Consummatum est.(Latin) IT IS ACCOMPLISHED. (English) 

That  is why we call it “good” Friday – the understatement of all time. 

The figure on the cross brings us up short and captivates us. 

When Jesus predicted the passion to His disciples, He said “The son of man must be LIFTED UP.”

He was not talking about the Resurrection. He meant being strung up and nailed to a cross and put on view. Because what people see when they gaze at His broken body lifted high is THE LENGTH TO WHICH GOD’S LOVE WILL GO.  

The sight of the Crucifixion moves us. It breaks our hearts. But that is not enough. God wants us to respond.

 How?  A word of caution here. Christ tells us simply to TAKE UP OUR CROSS and follow Him. But I’m not sure we always get the right end of the stick about this commandment. 

I will never forget one Holy Week in a Brighton parish trying to help someone who was very disturbed and depressed and had taken an overdose. 

In all her distress, the thing she seemed most anxious to tell me was that she had not managed to give anything up for Lent.  

I don’t know whether this was seriously bothering her more than anything else or whether she thought it was the right thing to say to a priest. Either way it is a very sad reflection on the way the gospel has been interpreted and instilled in vulnerable people.

Taking up your cross was never supposed to be a self-absorbed exercise in masochism – if you must fast, said Jesus, do it in private and don’t make a song and dance about it. “Deny yourself” is a positive, not a negative, command. It is a means to an end, that of rising to the challenge loving other people instead of being self-absorbed.

In the words of “There is a green hill far away”:

O dearly, dearly has He loved and we must love Him too

And trust in His redeeming blood and try His works to do.