A Reflection on Good Friday

I imagine that many people—if not every person—reading this article is aware that the date of its publication, April 18, is Good Friday in the Christian liturgical calendar, an annual day of fasting, worship, and commemoration of the Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth for almost every self-described Christian denomination all over the world. Good Friday itself is an integral part of the larger observance of Holy Week and season of Easter/Pascha, which celebrates the Resurrection of Jesus from his death on the Cross. You may know as well that this year’s Good Friday is special, even more so than every Good Friday is special in its own right, at least in my humble opinion. This is one of those rare years where the Gregorian and Julian calendars’ calculations of Easter coincide; these calendars are used by (very broadly speaking) ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Christians, respectively. This means that this Good Friday is currently being celebrated at the same time by over two billion people, which is almost a third of the world’s population. Furthermore, this week is also the celebration of the Jewish Passover, and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan only ended a few weeks ago, marking this time of the year as especially sacred, and not just for Christians alone. As a Christian myself, I respectfully cannot comment on the specific meaning of Ramadan or Passover, and I make no claim to speak for Christians as a whole or even my specific creed (Catholic), either. But, I would like to offer, with the humility due to it, a personal reflection on today’s significance that I hope is not just of interest to my fellow Christians, or even other religious traditions, but to everyone. 

Today, or really the present moment, is also special for another, much more depressing reason. You, like me, are probably all too painfully aware of the current political state of not only the United States but of the world at large, so aware that I need only mention the current presidential administration, Ukraine, and Gaza to have an utterly heartbreaking series of images, stories, and statistics immediately come to mind to anyone with a moral conscience, which perhaps is a fewer number of people than we used to believe. It seems that, more than ever in my relatively short life, the world is full of the most unjust suffering, perpetuated by frankly evil abuses of power, and that an end to them is nowhere in sight, with the terrifying probability that they will somehow get even worse. I am not here to offer a political, social, economic, or even religious ‘solution’ to one or any of these problems. Nor am I interested in offering empty lip service in the form of ‘words of sympathy’ to the victims of these evils, as I cannot claim to truly understand their suffering, and the help they need is not in the form of mere words but deeds, and courageous ones at that. 

I am here, however, to humbly offer what I have often turned to for support in the face of the personal despair that so threatens our ability to even begin any project of resistance to these evils. I turn to the story of Easter itself and the Passion, in which the sorrow of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane does not prevent him from doing what he knew must be done even at the cost of his own life. A story in which the sorrow of his closest disciples, including Mary Magdalene and even his own mother Mary, does not prevent them from witnessing his death and recovering his body and honoring it with a tomb. This is a story in which the world seems lost, broken, and evil to the disciples who hide in fear after Jesus’ death. But they do not hide for long, because Good Friday is not the end of the story, and every Easter Sunday, in just two days from now, Christians will celebrate the hope of the Resurrection, the defeat of death. But there is a day that the Gospels do not speak of, and that day is Saturday. 

As the Jewish-born French-American scholar George Steiner remarks in his book Real Presences (1989), we already know of Good Friday, the “interminable suffering” of our fellow human beings, and we also know of Sunday, about which even “[i]f we are non-Christians or non-believers… We conceive of it as the day of liberation from inhumanity and servitude. We look to resolutions, by they therapeutic or political, by they social or messianic” (232). For Steiner, “ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday,” between today and Sunday, between sorrow and hope, is tomorrow, Holy Saturday. This day has strong connotations of waiting and expectancy for hope, but these things are not necessarily synonymous with inaction, for what do we do when waiting for dinner guests but cook and clean? What do we do when expecting to see a loved one but prepare to see them? Even Christ himself performed an act of cosmic significance on this day, harrowing Hell to free the captives of death. 

I would propose that the central note of this active waiting, this meaningful expectancy, this enormous tension between sorrow and hope, is love. I propose that the courage of Jesus in Gethsemane, of the disciples at the foot of the cross, of Mary Magdalene anointing Jesus’ body, came from love, and that these acts are indeed acts of love, performed in the depths of despair, of sorrow without a clear hope. As St. Paul remarks in 1 Corinthians 13:7, love is greater than even hope or faith, for “[l]ove bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” The movement from our present sorrow to our future hope, then, is only possible through love, not as an ideal but actual material movement, actions, deeds, works, the greatest expression of which is the self-sacrifice of Christ on the Cross that Christians remember every Good Friday. As Jesus himself says in John 15:13, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Love is indeed the core of the two greatest commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbor (Mark 12:28–34). In many ways, these two are the same commandment, as Jesus says in Matthew 25:40, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” I emphasize the necessity of understanding love as much more so an act, rather than simply a feeling, because, just as James 2:20 remarks that faith without works is dead, so too is love without works dead, for how can we say we love someone, or even just have sympathy for them, if we are not willing to feed them, to protect them, to alleviate their suffering, to risk ourselves for their sake? 

So, on this Good Friday I am not asking you to stop up the wellspring of your sorrow, and neither am I demanding you leap into Sunday, to wring hope from the washcloth of your heart. I am humbly asking for you to love with the true love ofdeeds large and small, for we grieve because of love and to love is both the beginning of hope and the achieving of that hope. It is good to sorrow today, but tomorrow is Saturday, and you and I have work to do before Sunday may begin.