I have been thinking a lot about how this Good Friday is so very very different than all of those I have experienced in the past.
I think what sets Good Friday apart for me this year is how very clearly I can connect into Jesus’ struggles. The incarnation meets lived reality in a way that conveys so very clearly to me that God gets it! God understands the struggles of those who are oppressed, of the innocent who suffer injustice, of a parent who mourns the loss of a child, of profound abandonment and isolation, of death. God gets it, because through Jesus, God lives it! In his vulnerability, Jesus mirrors our own vulnerability, as well as our shared need for solidarity in and through suffering.
As we are moving from Good Friday to Easter, it can seem that during this pandemic the reality is more like “Good Friday meets Groundhog Day,” We are facing rolling weeks of peaks and plateaus. As one city or province exhales, another holds its collective breath. An endless stream of Good Fridays appears to loom on the horizon. How do we face the waves of suffering, fear, and uncertainty, shrouded in tears for our sick and dying loved ones? How do we shift to an understanding of isolation as an active, communal undertaking? As opposed to a suffering passively endured by a solitary individual.
In this time of COVID-19, how do we live into Good Friday?
Like Veronica, we wipe the faces of the suffering by covering our own faces with masks — homemade perhaps — but not the ones that are in short supply and needed by our doctors and nurses, our health care workers and first responders.
Like Simon of Cyrene, we take risks as essential workers, by reporting to work. While some of us head to professions on the frontlines that always carried an element of risk, others of us head to jobs hidden in plain sight – that only now are revealed as vital to the survival of our communities.
Like the meeting of mother and son on the Way of the Cross, we are the surrogate touch in ICU, or the one that makes possible a last farewell via a cellphone or tablet.
We are the weeping women of Jerusalem waiting for word, praying even harder, for those we love and those we do not even know.
We are Joseph of Arimathea awaiting the bodies, providing temporary resting places until families can bury the dead they mourn.
We are Jesus, those among us who are walking the way of the cross, afflicted by a virus that threatens our very lives and cuts us off from the human touch we most crave.
This year, we are not just remembering Good Friday. We are living it.
[In 2017, I was the homilist on Good Friday. You can find my reflection HERE.]