I realized these past 40 days how much time I spent playing Sudoku, playing Bejeweled, drinking coffee or scarfing down desserts. I realized, too, I could get along quite nicely without these supports.
Today, Good Friday, the Church ritually takes away the last, great, seemingly irreplaceable support to our happiness and stability: Jesus himself.
A Good Friday liturgy is unlike any other in the year. There is no Mass. Rather, the people gather around 3 p.m. and the priest and deacon enter in silence. They prostrate themselves on the ground in front of a bare altar and an empty tabernacle. The emptiness taunts us. Jesus is gone.
The Passion (suffering) of Jesus Christ is solemnly chanted with no frills. At the point where Jesus breathes his last, all fall on their knees in silent mourning for a man who died on a cross 2,000 years ago.
Then a crucifix is held high for the people to come forward to venerate. Something visceral takes place as we worship a God so powerfully weak that he died. Human history has courted various gods over the millennia: Horus, Vishnu, Woden, Thor and Zeus, to name a few. All were powerful in their own way. But only one God was vulnerable and came to be with us in our weakness.
This liturgy does not end; it stops. The celebrants walk off with no song or music. The altar is stripped and we are taunted again by a small glimpse of what the disciples must have felt that Passover evening in Jerusalem.
Paradoxically, our omnipotent God has become infinitely more approachable, lovable and adorable (in the original meaning of the word!) precisely because God has become so vulnerable. This, in turn, reopens an old wound in our hearts and souls: life without Jesus.
Good Friday haunts us with the specter of our losing God.
Throughout history, different peoples have suffered the incomparable loss of all that they had once held dear. The Israelites certainly felt this when the Babylonians invaded Israel and destroyed their Temple. They went through this nightmare again in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed the second Temple and dispersed the Jews around the empire.
Imagine how we Catholics would feel if St. Peter's Basilica were destroyed. Does our faith depend on a building, even one as majestic and historical and beautiful as the Vatican? Or the papacy? Would our faith continue if we were suddenly deprived of these? But that's the emptiness Good Friday would have us consider.
In the void that is Good Friday we are forced to get our priorities straight. Before we can be filled with the joy that is Easter, we need to contemplate our utter emptiness in union with him who emptied himself for us.
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