On this Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion, it is good to face, insofar as we are able, the inexpressible horror of Jesus’ passion. Not only the pain, the utter desolation, and the shattering of all expectations, but the tragedy of human sin. But at the same time, we want to turn our faces to the immeasurable mercy of God. The holy women standing at a distance from Jesus’ cross felt helpless in the face of the reality, bewildered perhaps, and maybe even stupefied at what had happened. This was the inexpressible horror that was difficult to face. On the other hand, we have the scene of Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple at the cross. Even greater sorrow, but with Our Lady, an absolute acceptance of God’s will. I mention this because of one consolation that God gives to us in the face of all this: the prayers of the psalms, the divinely chosen prayers that enable us to pass through even the valley of darkness which is the Passion of Jesus.
The psalms feature prominently in our Holy Week Liturgies. Divinely inspired songs, they are – laments, thanksgivings, praises, curses – you name it, the whole gamut of human responses to the realities of our world, are summed up in the psalms, especially those used in the liturgy. They accompany us as we watch the mission of Jesus unfold. At each point in the liturgy, the Church sets before us psalms that correspond to the inner heart of Jesus.
Here are some examples. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This was the psalmist’s cry taken up by Jesus when he could not shield his face from buffets and spitting which he endured out of love for us unto death. Or again, from the Holy Thursday liturgy, “I will take up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord,” which was literally fulfilled when Jesus took up the cup of Passover wine and changed it into the cup of his blood in the institution of the Eucharist. Or today, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” that is, the moment when Jesus experienced the ultimate abandonment by his Father and yet embraced the mystery of the Father’s will. There are many other examples we could bring forward, examples from our daily rounds of psalmody that carry us throughout our days as monks. How else could we carry out our mission of intercession for the world without the psalms? How else could we bear the alternation of joys and sorrows which are our lot in this life. The psalms give us hope that the last word will be God’s as Jesus showed us with his cry, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
The psalms give us hope that we can express the inexpressible – both the absolute horror of the cross and the evil that our human race is capable of, and the absolute love that God showed in raising Jesus from the dead and us from the death of sin. The psalms, especially as we hear them on the lips of Jesus, are the healing balm that the Father gives us in these holy days. Let us sing them in union with Jesus who alone is capable of expressing the inexpressible in his sufferings and his joys.
