Good Friday - Love that Embraces All

Good Friday is maybe the hardest day for people of faith. The horror of our Beloved being betrayed, denied, abandoned, tried and tortured and killed like a criminal. (John 18:1-19:42)The questions about why whirl around us and through us. And the mystery of how does life, salvation, love, hope and peace come out of such violence and suffering? Knowing that the story ends in resurrection and new life does not completely do away with our questions or struggles for meaning.

The church by tradition often celebrates the Three Great Days of Easter – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Day (and sometimes other services as well) as a single seamless act of worship. In this spirit I am reflecting over these days on Three Perspectives of Divine Love for us.

Looking at Good Friday as an expression of the nature of the Divine’s love for us we see, quite literally and theologically, that God loves us all with open arms, that the love of God embraces all persons and all things across all time. Jesus died upon the cross with his arms flung wide in a gesture of surrender and vulnerability (the humiliation of the cross) but also of inclusion and taking into his very self all persons and all of our broken, desperate, sinful, limited and limiting nature of the human condition.

When the Divine chose incarnation, chose to become flesh, that choice was always going to include death – it is the nature of creaturely existence. But the honored ones of the Hebrew Bible had died old and full of days. Jesus died young and without honor, among criminals abandoned by his own and crushed by Roman authorities. Jesus not only died but he suffered and the forces of his time sought to destroy him and all that he had come to teach and make real. And for a moment in history, for a few long hours, it seemed that those forces had succeeded. But we know that they did not! We know that this story leads to resurrection and new life.

But still every year at Easter, and many times in between, we are brought back to this place to consider our Beloved as one who was brutalised and broken, who was bruised and tormented as we sometimes are, and who was physically defeated although he remained a spirit filled with compassion towards those he loved and was leaving, those who hung on either side, and even those who participated in his punishment.

Arms flung wide in surrender and vulnerability Jesus took every thing, every human need, sin, failure and fear, every experience into his own body and being and therefore into the embrace of the Divine from whom he came and to whom he was returning. Because of this day, this terrible event, there is nothing that is outside of the Divine’s embrace, there is nothing that is not gathered into the heart at the centre of the cosmos, the heart out of which we were created and to whom we will return.

Because of this terrible yet wonderful day we can be confident that everything, including the most terrible, cannot separate us from the love of God. The arms of Jesus stretched wide in apparent defeat point us to the embrace of the Divine that takes our everything into the heart of God, there to transform and heal all that is broken and cruel.

This is our salvation that we are wrapped again in the embrace of our Creator and Redeemer and that same Spirit of Love flows through us and our broken world with grace and the promise of renewal and resurrection.

May I share with you one of my favorite prayers of the church:

Come, O Spirit of God, and make within us

your dwelling place and home.

May our darkness be dispelled by your light,

and our troubles calmed by your peace;

may all evil be redeemed by your love,

all pain transformed through the suffering of Christ,

and dying glorified by his risen life. 

Amen

You may like to consider a previous reflection on Good Friday.

The Tree of Life

Or you may like to consider other reflections I have written in previous years.

Good Friday

This is my work informed by everything I have heard, read and experienced. I am indebted to the wisdom of others. This week I am especially grateful to:

Borg, Marucs J & Crossan, John Dominic “The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem” Harper-Collins, New York, 2006