One of the questions I asked myself a lot in my early days of searching for God was Why did Jesus have to die? Why was today, which marks Jesus’ crucifixion, called Good Friday? It is a mystery that I believe we continually wrestle with as we journey in our spiritual life. And each year on Good Friday, confronted again by the symbols and images of the Crucifixion, we again try to make sense of the brutality of this day. How do we understand that the cross, while being a symbol of sacrifice,is also a symbol of love and of hope? It is not a question that allows for easy, off the cuff answers. It is one that we spend time with, mulling it over in view of our experiences of life, and of suffering, and of love.
One way of looking at the question is to see that Jesus’ death, his sacrifice, is not so much about substitution about seeing his death as somehow substituting for ours – but more about solidarity. Jesus suffers and dies in solidarity with all the suffering in the world. His violent death acknowledges the all-too-violent ways of humanity, and reminds us of the ways we hurt each other, whether in the past actions against our First Nations in Canada’s Residential Schools; or the treatment of the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, or whether it is in places like Rwanda, Srebrenica, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Syria; or today – the Russian aggression in Ukraine. We are reminded that we continue to live in a violent world. A suffering world. And I suspect that the central reason we live in this type of world is the human inclination to want the dying of others, instead of dying to ourselves— to our own illusions, pretences, narcissism, and self-defeating behaviours.
So in the midst of all this, how can we begin to see the Cross of suffering as a sign of love and hope? More than anything, the Cross shows us that 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!
So in the darkness of this day – In the despair that might bubble up within us as we look around our world and see that not much has changed since the death of Jesus. Let’s remember that even the crucifixion cannot kill love. And acknowledging the violence of that cross, the violence that humanity is capable of, calls us to a better way. The way of Love. And so the cross becomes a sign of hope for us. A hope that chooses to be loving in spite of what we know of the world. A hope that recognizes there is no such thing as an angry God – only an unconditionally loving God. A hope that seeks to understand the other person. A hope that reaches out in love to all who suffer and are oppressed. A hope that speaks out for those who have no voice, A hope that finds the blindness within ourselves that prevents us from seeing and loving others. A hope that lives into our own loving relationships, even across differences and barriers, and chooses a different way, a better way, the way of love
And while we struggle today with the meaning of this Friday, it is always with the knowledge of what happened on the third day. That on Easter Sunday, the act of love taken today by God becomes the incredible revelation of the resurrection, and the beginning of a whole new way of seeing and connecting with God.