What makes this day “Good”?
El Greco’s Jesus Carrying the Cross
What Christians observe on Good Friday is the paradox of the death of God, Dr. Regis Martin told me in a compelling interview on my radio show on this day in 2006. “What could be worse?” he said. “It ends badly, the Apostles must have felt, and they were forlorn, shattered and abandoned. But then the contrast, the paradox of the Resurrection of Easter Sunday.”
It is the divine mystery, this singular day of the Triduum. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, my second guest on the show that same day, urged us to take some time on Good Friday and not hurry to get to Easter Sunday.
Our discussion centered on his book “Death on a Friday Afternoon“, a compelling meditation on…it all.
If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything.
Explore the Crucifixion is, he urges,
an exploration into the meaning of suffering, of justice, of loss, of death and of whatever hope there may be on the far side of death.
This is more than a day, Fr. Neuhaus points out, but for those of us who recognize it as a day, it is one to live differently.
We contemplate for a time the meaning of Good Friday, and then return to what is called the real world of work and shopping and commuter trains and homes…
Do not rush to the conquest. Stay a while in the eclipse of the light, stay a while with the conquered One. There is time enough for Easter.
So what do we contemplate?
Atonement. At-one-ment. What was separated by an abyss of wrong has been reconciled by the deed of perfect love. What the first Adam destroyed the second Adam has restored. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We knew not what we did when we reached for the right to name good and evil. We knew not what we did when we grabbed what we could and went off to a distant country. We knew not what we did when, in the madness of excusing ourselves, we declared God guilty. But today we have come to our senses. Today, here at the cross, our eyes are fixed on the dying derelict who is the Lord of life. We look at the One who is everything that we are and everything that we are not, the One who is true man and true God. In him we, God and man, are perfectly one. At-one-ment.
Hence, through the cross, we have come home, home to the truth about ourselves, home to the truth about what God has done about what we have done. And now we know, or begin to know, why this awful, awe-filled Friday is called good.