Why do we call this day Good?
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus contemplates that profound question in his excellent book “Death on a Friday Afternoon,” and he raises many others equally meditative.
Was it necessary for Christ to die? Is it necessary that we suffer and die? If so, why? What is the connection between the undeniable fact of evil in the world and some ultimate justice? Does justice require punishment, and, if so, how can it be just that the one person in history who was not guility should suffer such a cruel death? In a culture devoted to pleasure and the avoidance of suffering, is it possible that bad things can be redemptive?
Those are just from the jacket cover of this “sustained meditation on the meanings and mysteries of this day,” and I knew long in advance of this day last year that I wanted Fr. Neuhaus on my radio show for a special Good Friday edition to discuss the event that stopped time and changed the world. I had highlighted many points in the book and we followed that through a…transcendent…discussion of this day set “apart from all other days, even other holy days.”
Good Friday is not just one day of the year…It is not simply the dismal but necessary prelude to the joy of Easter…
So begins the book that Fr. Neuhaus calls “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.”
Do not rush to the conquest. Stay a while with this day. Let your heart be broken by the unspeakably bad of this Friday we call good…There is time enough for Easter.
This is the center of the Triduum, the three days that are liturgically one, from Holy Thursday until Easter begins with the Saturday Vigil.
This is the axis mundi, the center upon which the cosmos turns.
It is all about atonement.
Think of at-one-ment: What was separated is now at one. But after such a separation there can be no easy reunion. Reconciliation must do justice to what went wrong. It will not do to merely overlook the wrong. We could not bear to live in a world where wrong is taken lightly, where right and wrong finally make no difference…
Atonement is not an accountant’s trick…Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and martyr under the tyranny of the Third Reich, wrote against and lived against the “cheap grace” that devalues sin and forgiveness alike…Cheap grace does not reckon what went wrong; it requires no costly love.
Neuhaus contemplates the “First Word” from the cross.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Whatever the theory of atonement, this is at the heart of it, that forgiveness costs…
Good Friday, he says, makes inescapable the question of complicity in that cost.
The late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was fond of saying, “Some are guilty, all are responsible.”
…Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The line between good and evil runs through every human heart.”
We would draw the line between ourselves and the really big-time sinners. For them the cross may be necessary. For us a forgiving wink from an understanding Deity will set things to right. But the “big time” of sinning is in every human heart. We make small our selves when we make small our sins…
John Donne was right: “No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” It was not only for our sins, but surely for our sins too.
Christ at the Column by Caravaggio
This is at the heart of atonement, Neuhaus ponders, starting with the fact that something has gone terribly wrong.
Second, whatever the measure of our guilt, we are responsible. Then, third, something must be done about it. Things must be set right. We cannot go on this way. False gospels of positive thinking or stoic exhortations to make the best of it are worse than useless–they are obscene…The religious marketplace is crowded with the peddlers of peace of mind and peace of soul. But the narcotic of denial or pretense is too high a price to pay…
Things must be set to right. And this brings us to the fourth great truth of atonement: Whatever it is that needs to be done, we cannot do it…
God must become what we are in order that we might become what God is. To effectively take our part, he must take our place.
And so there you are. There we all are, actually.
At-one-ment. Here, 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.