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+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
“When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, ‘it is finished’; and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (John 19:30).
When Rita and I lived in Chicago during my seminary days, we would often attend the Church of the Ascension, North Lasalle Street. It was an Anglo-Catholic shrine parish under the very godly rectorship of Father Gregory Norris, a one-time Benedictine monk who after his rectorship converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. It was where we first experienced a Solemn High Mass and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament as we do here.
On the front wall of the church facing North Lasalle Street and all its city traffic was a life-size crucifix over which was written the words from the Book of Lamentations, “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?” (Lam. 1:12). For many who passed by it was nothing because the dramatic figure of Jesus crucified was irrelevant, and many passed by so quickly and hurriedly that it was not even noticed.
But we’re different than the passers by who didn’t pause or see the call to think, not because we’re special or holy, but because we’re here inside a church where for nearly three hours we have deliberately focused ourselves upon the man on the cross. It is good that we’re here on Good Friday, but what good comes from a dead man on a cross who claimed to be God? He hangs there dead, and admitted that “It is finished”.
When we heard the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ on Palm Sunday through the words of St. Matthew’s Gospel, we heard that those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “you who would destroy the Temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross. So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, he saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him; for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’ And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way”.
But there He hangs. Fastened to a cross, and never did He attempt to come down. His body is torn. He’s practically de-limbed because of the weight of His body upon the sockets of His arms and shoulders. He has lost much blood, and He has suffocated. He is dead, but He could have altered the physicality and instrumentality of it all, and come down. Why, Lord, did you stay there? Why didn’t you do something?
When I traveled to Dallas/Fort Worth last week for a bishops meeting, I read on the flight some incredibly powerful thoughts from a Peter Leithart, a contributing writer to Touchstone Magazine in the March issue. I want to quote him at length, and it is fairly brief.
“After Jesus heals the man born blind, he left the new disciple to face the bullying of the Pharisees all by himself, and doesn’t come back into the story until the man is excommunicated from the synagogue. The Jews stone Stephen and Jesus doesn’t come to the rescue. Countless martyrs are tortured without mercy, and God doesn’t intervene. Christians are slandered, but God does nothing to silence their accusers.
The taunt of unbelief—you serve God, let him rescue you—hits far too close to home. Why doesn’t Jesus help? Why does our God forsake us?
Perhaps, in part, so that his cry of dereliction becomes ours, as we suffer in him, with him, on our own particular crosses, and thus come to share in his faith. In his abandonment, Jesus trusted his Father for rescue, and that hope was rewarded in the resurrection. In moments of persecution especially, we walk by faith not by sight, hoping against hope for a vindication that has not yet come”. ― Peter J. Leithart
He stays on the cross so that we can cry also in dereliction, as we see that our cry was like His. He did not lose faith in His sense of abandonment and in the darkness of human loneliness. He questioned God, but never forsook Him. He did trust in God that there would be a rescue, but a later rescue forged by staying the course.
Jesus had said that when He was lifted up on the cross, He would draw all men to himself. He has stayed on the cross to draw us there, to know as the Collect for Friday in the Morning Office and it being the same for Monday in Holy Week that He “went not up to joy but first He suffered pain, and entered not into glory before He was crucified”.
Did He not say, “He who would find his life must lose it”?
He today lost His life for something more. He stayed with such losing to find a great find when the grave stone was rolled back by the angels and light poured in upon the Light of the world whose light was darkened to burn brightly then, now, and forever. And when He walked out of the tomb, the scars of His Passion and Death were forever emblazoned upon His body, a body that stayed where He had come to die, and on which the prelude to Resurrection was played to its completion.
We adore thee, O Christ, and bless thee because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world.
+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
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