A Good Friday Meditation

Jesus came to earth to teach us about God and to show us the love of the Father, to forgive our sins, and to redeem and reconcile us to Himself. He came to be Love Incarnate. Good Friday is an especially good day to remember and meditate upon this. It is a day to unite ourselves to Him for that purpose.

Jesus also came to earth to sanctify suffering. He took on a human form and was born a baby, of a woman. Our God lived life on this earth in a human body for thirty three years and immersed Himself in the human experience. For this reason, "God, too, knows exactly how it feels to be cold, or tired, or hungry, or sore with pain, because he, too, has had a body. He has spent long hours, for years at a time, doing the routine and unspectacular work of a carpenter, has walked long days over dusty roads with tired feet, has curled his shoulders against the night air or a chill rain, has been without sleep while others slept, has been thirsty and hot and weary and ready to drop from exhaustion.... [He] must have had headaches and toothaches and backaches and aching bones, must have been anxious and annoyed and irritated at times" (Ciszek, He Leadeth Me, 100). He was a human being, though still God, composed, like us, of body and soul, and He experienced suffering accordingly. 

As if this daily suffering was not enough, He went a step further. He experienced what it was "to stumble and fall, be bruised and mangled and torn. He cried out at last, as have all of us at one time or another, to be spared any more burdens or suffering" (Ciszek,100). 

In addition, He made Himself to be vulnerable and to be in need of our love. "...at the incarnation, Jesus, the eternal Son, assumed a human nature and a human heart. And if his Heart truly is human, if he truly is like us in all things but sin, then his Heart is filled with the desire not only to love but also to be loved.... In other words, by taking on a human heart, God, in Christ, made himself vulnerable.... By his free choice, God allowed himself, in Jesus Christ, to feel a need for our love" (Gaitley, 33 Days to Merciful Love, 155). In becoming human and in choosing this vulnerability and this need for our love, Jesus feels pain when we do not love Him. He thirsts for our love. Fr. Gaitley even says Jesus has a "burning thirst for love from those for whom he gave up his life" (Gaitley, 155). This burning thirst continues even to this day. His need for our love, as well as His desire to pour His love out on us, continues and will continue throughout eternity. Just as we all need love and respect, as a part of our human condition, and we feel a great deal of pain when we are not loved, the same is true of Jesus.

Truly, Jesus suffered and continues to suffer. We are no longer alone in our pain. Our God, our Savior, has joined us in it and shares in it with us. He has united Himself to us in all aspects of our human experience of suffering. Jesus is God and did not suffer for His own sake. His divinity had no need for it, but His suffering, both in the routine, everyday life and work and in His passion and death, sanctified our own suffering.

Suffering entered this world with the Fall, with Adam and Eve’s sin. It has been a part of this world from that time on and continues to be a part of this world. Jesus did not take away our suffering. Our human frailty and free will would have made it virtually impossible for Him to do that in any lasting way. Instead, in His wisdom, He chose to suffer with us and to give our suffering meaning and purpose.

Like with His Baptism, where, though His divinity did not necessitate it, He was baptized in order to sanctify Baptism and the Baptismal waters, part of the reason for His suffering and death was to sanctify suffering. God brings good out of all things, including our crosses and difficulties. By His experiencing and walking through such suffering, He brought His holiness to the reality of suffering. It is a holiness and a sanctification we can now experience in our own crosses. Through the gift of His own suffering and death, He lifts us up to something more and redeems us and our suffering so that our pain has purpose and so that we are made to be more than we previously were, so that we can reach holiness in Him by those very trials that would otherwise tear us down.

Some of God's greatest gifts come out of our crosses. He is there within those crosses and within that suffering. When we accept and surrender our trials to Him, we are able to find Him there with us. We are able to enter into a communion and a deep relationship with Him, to walk with Him, yoked to Him.

By His suffering, we are no longer alone in ours. We are no longer alone in our physical pain or in our exhaustion, nor are we alone in our emotional pain and our need for love. Even more than before His Incarnation and death, we can turn to our God with our pain and unite it to His. We can stand in solidarity with Him. As two hurt people can come together and console each other by their very presence and by their sharing of the burden, we can turn to Jesus in our pain and stand in solidarity with Him.

In our suffering, we are also broken, as Jesus had been. We are made to be vulnerable. Our brokenness and vulnerability become beautiful when united with His and when it creates in us an openness to His love and to the shared experience of the cross with Him. It is beautiful when it creates in us a realization of our need for Him and for His love and a reaching out to Him who can hold and comfort us and be with us in our pain.

There is a prayer, the "Anima Christi," among whose petitions is "Within Thy wounds hide me." It is very powerful to pray these words when we are suffering. "Lord, hold me within Your very wounds. Cradle me in my pain and surround me with Your flesh. Comfort me as we share in this experience of pain." In doing so, though, we also have something to offer to Jesus. We can comfort Him. "Lord, as you cradle me within your wounds, may my very being and may my own suffering which I offer to You be a balm of love that relieves a portion of Your pain."

This shared suffering brings with it a communion with Him, a mingling of our suffering with His. In a spiritual sense, it brings with it a mingling of our blood with His. 

By our acceptance of that which we do not want, that which hurts us, out of love for Him, as He did out of love for us, we die to ourselves and live for Him. We unite ourselves to our very Source, to He who is the Source of all holiness and of all sanctification. In doing this, He lifts us up to Himself and pours Himself into our own hearts in a special way. This love that we give to Him, our God and our Savior, and this love that He gives to us, cracks open our hearts and recreates us into that which our Father has first created us to be. In our suffering and in our brokenness, we are sanctified. We are made holy.