Faithful
Cross, O Tree all beauteous!
Tree all
peerless and divine!
Not a
grove on earth can show us,
Such a
flower and leaf as thine.
Sweet the
nails and sweet the wood,
Laden with so sweet a load.
On Good Friday we will kiss the cross because this ancient instrument of torture was embraced by Christ Jesus, for here in his love for us, he could destroy death. Truly "the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing” – incessantly pouring Godself out for us. On the cross, God in Christ gives all his love to the shedding of his last drop of blood. And death becomes a gateway.
And as he did for Lazarus, so he does for us - Jesus goes to the dead silence of the tomb, of our tombs, and confronts the mute stillness and the stench, as he cries out: “Arise my fair one, my beloved and come forth. Come forth, you whom I love, arise from the dead, step out into the light. Come to my side. Awake, my Father did not make you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, you who were fashioned by my word in the beginning. Rise, let us go hence, for you are in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.”*
Jesus enfleshes the vulnerable compassion that God is, the groaning of God at whatever traps us. Jesus comes to dead ends, to this most final dead end, and says, “No! God won’t have it.” God in Christ is breaking through with hope and the promise of a way out and through. “The Father has sent me to proclaim release, and freedom, and to wipe the tears from all faces. I will open your tombs and have you rise from them.” Death’s finality is debunked, trampled down forever.
What Jesus did for Lazarus, as we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel, is what the Father will do for him his well-beloved Son on Easter. Jesus enacts God’s promise to all of us who like Lazarus are his dear friends.
Jesus
breaks through the boundary because God’s love is in fact boundless. The resurrection is not just an end-of-life
episode, but, far better, our ongoing lived relationship
with Christ Jesus through the Spirit moment
by moment and in our final moment. Resurrection is not an episode it is
a Person. It is he who speaks with us, he whom we see and consume, as he breaks
bread with us each day at Mass. The Master is here asking for us, the God who
weeps with us, for us, and promises us the beauty of eternal life. Let us go to him.
*Adapted from an
ancient homily for Holy Saturday.
