Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera, D.D., J.C.L.
Bishop of Scranton
HOMILY
Good Friday – April 22, 2011
In a talk given by the late Pope John Paul II in 1987, the Holy Father shared profound words about the all-embracing love of God. He began his reflections with a reference to the gospel of Saint John: “Love, then, consists in this: not that we have loved God but that he has loved us and has sent his Son as an offering for our sins.” The Holy Father continued: “God’s love for us is freely given and unearned, surpassing all we could ever hope for or imagine. He does not love us because we have merited it or are worthy of it. God loves us, rather, because he is true to his nature. As Saint John puts it, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”
My friends, the greatest proof of God’s love is shown in the fact that he loves us in our human condition, with our weaknesses and our needs. Nothing else but the reality of God’s love can explain this day. Nothing else can explain the mystery of the Cross.
In so many ways, this day is unique, isn’t it? It’s the only day in the Church year on which we don’t celebrate Mass. We’ll have the opportunity to receive Holy Communion later on in this liturgy – but the Eucharist we receive was consecrated yesterday during the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. … In a singular manner, we focus our attention on the passion and death of Jesus and the wood of the cross. … And perhaps more than any other day, you and I bring an honesty to this liturgy as we place before the Lord our struggles, our pain, our suffering – our crosses.
Look at what we place before the Lord. Look at what we bring to the Lord this day.
We place before the Lord, the cross of human suffering inflicted so arbitrarily because of natural disasters – and we pray especially for the people of Japan who lost so quickly and unexpectedly thousands of brothers and sisters, mothers and father, sons and daughters.
We place before the Lord, the cross of injustice that emerges because of selfishness, hatred and war which steals the freedom and hope of innocent lives, particularly the unborn, caught in the cross fire of those who have lost touch with basic values in a world gone so awry.
We place before the Lord, the cross constructed from acts of sexual abuse – some of which have emerged from within the very Church of Christ that should have provided protection from harm and exploitation.
We place before the Lord, the crosses that come from human frailty, sickness and age; the crosses that come from grief and loss.
In the face of these crosses and countless others that we bring to the Lord on this unique and singular day – Good Friday – perhaps some of us dare to say: “Where is God in the midst of our pain and suffering?” “Where is God in answer to my prayers?”
The Jewish author, Elie Wiesel, in his book Night, chronicles the horrors he experienced living in Nazi death camps during the Second World War. He remembers a young boy, hanged with two other men at the Nazi camp at Buna. He writes:
“For more than ½ an hour, the boy struggled between life and death, dying a slow agony under our eyes. We had to look at him full in the face. Behind me, I heard someone asking: “Where is God now?” And Dr. Wiesel goes on to say: “I heard a voice within me answer: ‘Where is God? Here he is – he is hanging here on these gallows.’”
And we turn our attention to the cross on which hangs Jesus, our crucified God. A crucified God not due to a lack of relevance in the midst of a suffering world. No – a crucified God – suffering with a broken world – suffering with victims of abuse – suffering with those afflicted with cancer and aids – suffering with all those who grieve because of loss and death.
God could have chosen to relate to his creation in anyway he wanted. Yet he chose to relate to it – to us who are made in his very image and likeness – through his son Jesus, who took on human flesh and substance. And he chose to have Jesus carry a cross so that we, in our suffering – pain – and grief might discover a God who understands – because he too carried a cross – and a God who reminds us that we do not suffer alone.
And what underlies this motivation on the part of God to relate so intimately to his creation – to me and to you? Love.
God loves us with an utterly pure and generous love. He doesn’t become greater or happier because we love him. He doesn’t love us because we have somehow merited his love. God loves us only because he is pure, unbounded love. Nonetheless, the scriptures teach that he loves passionately. God showers us with gifts: creation itself, the talents we’ve been given, the relationships entrusted to our care, and so, so many other blessings.
But you know as well as I that passionate love also includes a readiness to suffer with and for the one we love. In Jesus, God has loved us to the point of suffering and dying. The cross – the central image of this Good Friday and the focus of our lives as Christians – is the supreme proof of God’s love for us, the supreme demonstration that “God is love!”
I share with you again words offered by Pope John Paul II, who will be beatified by Pope Benedict in just over a week’s time: “Man cannot live without love. … Our life is senseless, if love is not revealed to us, if we do not encounter love, if we do not experience it and make it our own, if we do not participate in it.”
As we look upon the Cross, this Good Friday afternoon, may we find hope in the midst of the crosses we carry. May we begin to see that out of death comes life. And may we believe with a deep and abiding faith that the generous and passionate love of God for us is close at hand.
