Good Friday.  I guess we could say we are in the middle of, or in the beginning of the Sacred Triduum, the sacred three days of the passion of our Lord.  We celebrate Holy Thursday and Good Friday and the Easter Vigil tomorrow night and, of course, Easter Sunday.  A question can be asked, “What’s so good about Good Friday?”  The church is bare and dark.  The Eucharist is not here, for God, for Christ is not here.  It is a day of pain, fasting and brokenness and emptiness.  You might think we would call this Bad Friday, a day that we beat our breast for all the faults of mankind.  But we call it Good Friday because on this day we remember that the Lord mounted His cross for love of us.  The cross is the symbol of the complete act of selfless love.  Without the cross, there can be no Resurrection.  Without the cross, we are all dead, dead forever in our sins. This Liturgy that we celebrate today is known as the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion.  We celebrate Good Friday.  We give praise and glory to God for the death of His Son Jesus on the cross.  It had to be this way.  Remember that He willing went to the cross.  He says earlier on in the Passion narrative, “If I wanted to I could have legions of angels protect me.  Put your swords away.”  But He didn’t want that.  He intentionally gave himself up to death.  That’s why He came.  He said that elsewhere.  He said, “What should I say, ‘Take this cup from me.’  It was for this reason I came, to drink of this cup, to suffer and to die so that these might be saved.”  Therefore, it was mission accomplished on this day and we celebrate the cross.

The cross.  His sacrifice is the greatest gift He could give to us.  There is no greater gift, no greater sacrifice than to lay down your life for your friends.  He could have done nothing more than what he did.  We treasure the gift.  What do you do with a gift?  We go “Ooohh.”  We treasure it.  You thank God for it.  You glory in it.  You lift it up.  Every year we celebrate the triumph of the cross. 

Yet the cross offends some.  By the cross, I mean the crucifix, the one with the corpus on it.  I mentioned recently that in a former parish that we had a crucifix in the cry room along with some other things.  Several people said, “Please, get that out of there.  It doesn’t’ look good.  The children don’t like to see that.”  Which I think is ridiculous when you try to keep children from seeing reality.  In fact, I told one of the people who told me that, “Why don’t you just move your kid to Disneyland and lock the kid up for 21 years and then let her out, if that’s the way you want to raise your kid.”  Even when someone dies, these same people will say, “What should I tell my child?”  Tell them the person’s died.  Let them go to the wake, let them go to the funeral.  They’ll be all right. 

When I came here to Los Alamos, someone said, “Are you going to do anything about that crucifix?”  (Pointing to the crucifix above the altar)  I said, “No.”  For those of you who haven’t been here a long time, there was a big brouhaha when this crucifix was put up there.  Some people said that it is ugly.  “Well, it was ugly”, a wise woman told me.  It wasn’t very pretty and it’s not supposed to be pretty.  I mention sometimes, you know, you go to a church and you see a crucifix with a corpus on it and the corpus looks like he has a smile on his face.  I never understand that.  He wasn’t like that on the cross.  He was happy and joyful on Easter morning but not on the cross.  The cross is not beautiful.  It is glorious but not beautiful. 

First Corinthians, Paul talks a lot about this because in the early Church there was a big struggle with Good Friday, with the fact that God died.  Paul tells us in First Corinthians, “For the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.  But to those who are being saved it is the power of God.”  The Scriptures see the cross in a glorious way.  In Galatians 6, “We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for He is our salvation, our life and resurrection.  Through Him we are saved and made free.”  First Corinthians, “For Christ did not send me to baptize,” says Paul, “but to preach the Gospel, not with words of human wisdom less the cross of Christ be empty of its power.”  In Galatians, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.”  Colossians, “For in Him all the fullness was pleased to dwell (the fullness of divinity) and through Him to reconcile all things, making peace by the blood of His cross.”  Finally in Hebrews 12, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”  In Mathew’s Gospel Jesus is taunted on the cross.  They say, “Come down from that cross and save yourself, since you are the Son of God.”  But by not coming down from that cross He saved you and me.

I want to talk briefly about the seven last words each Good Friday.  Often times we think about these seven last words.  You don’t find them all in any on of the four Gospels.  But in all four Gospels you’ll find these seven last sayings of Jesus. 

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”  That’s an amazing statement for Him to make, for anyone to make.  In the midst of the torture and execution, He pleads for us.  He pleads for those who were persecuting Him.  He not only forgives us, He becomes our attorney.  He defends us and He just tells the Father, “They don’t know what they’re doing so let them go.”  Yet, how petty can we be with our little grievances against each other.  We even imagine half of them.  They don’t even exist.  He’s just the opposite.  He teaches us how to forgive, to plead for the one who has hurt us. 

“Today you will be with Me in paradise.”  Legend says that He said that to legend to Dismas or Dimas, the good thief.  That of course was the first confession.  The good thief confesses that he is guilty.  Jesus hears his confession and responds with infinite mercy.  We deserve death, after all.  The good thief admitted that yet Jesus gives him the fullness of eternal life and a share in His divinity.  His mercy is His justice and His justice is His mercy. 

“Woman behold thy son, behold thy Mother.”  You know, I think, as I think about the Passion and these seven last words, I really believe that of all the pain and suffering Jesus endured that day, the greatest suffering was to see His Mother watching Him.  You know, I remember one of my prayers before my mother died, was that I prayed that she would die before me because if anything happened to me it would have just killed her.  You know, like many mothers, they think the sun rises and sets on their son.  In Mary’s case, she was right.  In my mother’s case, she wasn’t right at all.  One morning, my mother asked me, “What were you praying for this morning?”  I said, “I was praying that you’d die first.” And she said, “So was I.”  But Jesus had to watch His mother watch Him.  You know what I’m saying?  Wow.  I’m convinced that that was His greatest pain.  Then He gave her away to the beloved disciple.  He said, “Woman behold your son, son behold your Mother.”  He gave away His most precious possession. 

 
“My God, My God.  Why have You forsaken Me?”  Now that sounds like despair a little bit but the explanation of this, it is not of course.  What it means is this.  The scriptures tell us that Jesus became sin for us.  What that means is that He took on all the sins that had ever been committed by every human person who was ever conceived.  Can you imagine the weight of that sin?  He took all of that sin on Himself.  Again, the scripture says, “He became sin.”  That’s what it means.  At this moment, when He is about to take this sin and take it to hell where it belongs, He cries out, “Why have You forsaken Me?”  At that moment, Jesus the Son of the Father, was at the furthest pole away from God.  He was in absolute darkness.  He is fully human and He cries out in that darkness, “Why have You abandoned Me?”  He was calling to the Father from the abyss of death and he was answered that day in thunder. 

He was our scapegoat that day.  The Jews had a custom that once a year the priest would take two goats.  He would lay hands on one goat, that represented all the sins of the people of the previous year, and then the goat was chased into the desert.  The desert is the place of the devil.  The other goat was slain and used as a sacrifice to appease God.  That’s where the term “scapegoat” comes from.  Jesus, in effect, was our scapegoat.  He took on all our sins for us, willingly, of His own initiative.  Never say you are beyond hope.  Never say that and I hope that you have never said those words.  Sometimes people tell you they are beyond hope.  Well, it is not true.  No one is beyond hope.

“I thirst.”  He was thirsting for the world.  Like the woman at the well when He said, “I thirst,” what He meant was I thirst for your love and He thirsts for our love. 

“It is finished.”  He accepted death as certitude because He knew it had no power over Him and He was obedient unto death.  We have to stop living this lie that we are not going to die.  Live every day with death before you and you will live a good life.  Live every day denying that you will die, you will not live a good life.  Death is real and for the Christian, it should be welcomed. 

Finally, “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.”  What loyalty and what trust in God.  I hope that those are the last words that you say and I say on earth.  I really hope so.  I hope that when I am about to take my last breath, if I know it, that I say, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”  I hope you say that as well.

This is Good Friday.  It is because of Good Friday that we have the promise of eternal life and the knowledge that death has no more power over us.