Good Friday
Bishop of Lake Charles
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
April 2, 2010
Good Friday
“The wine press I have trodden alone.” Isaiah 63:3
When I was a young priest, the church in which I served had a number of beautiful and historic chalices. One had belonged to a former priest, a Frenchman who had been the son of a wine producer. His chalice was the most unique of all. Made of solid silver, the cup was a wine vat, the stem was a grape press, and the base was a basket of grapes waiting to be pressed. On the base was this inscription from Isaiah: “The wine press I have trodden alone” (Isaiah 63:3).
Loneliness is not a word we associate with Christ. After all, He is supposed to be there for us. We are the ones who are lonely. “Where is God?” we ask when we think that our selfish petitions are not answered. The cross, however, keeps getting in the way of this self-absorption. The cross keeps reminding us that He is there but not in the way we would like to have Him. We make our crucifixes antiseptically clean, not like the gory crosses belonging to our neighbors south of the border. Sometimes we forget the cross entirely or remove the body, inventing a Gospel of prosperity that bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in the Gospel. Perhaps that is why we forget the cross so often and why it would be important for us not to restrict our remembrance of the cross to Good Friday. Jesus expressed loneliness. It was part of His suffering, part of His cross.
What loneliness Jesus must have felt in the Garden of Gethsemane? He knew what was to happen. His disciples would abandon Him. His first chosen apostle would deny Him. Jesus said at that point, “My soul is sorrowful even to death” (Mark 14:34). Can we not identify with that? Haven’t our souls been sorrowful to death at times? With the loss of someone we loved, a parent, a spouse, a child, a friend? Think of our brothers and sisters in Haiti and Chile who today face a Good Friday having lost everything and the daunting task of rebuilding. What sorrow our souls feel when we are left alone to fight the world, when everything is crashing in upon us, when it seems as though there is nothing left to hold on to? We always act as though loneliness is a surprise. Loneliness, on the other hand, was no surprise to Jesus.
Isaiah had foretold that the Suffering Servant would dig into the depths of loneliness. The prophet wrote, “He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, one of those from who men hide their faces, spurned, and we held him in no esteem” (Isaiah 53:3). His loneliness was worse than that of the elderly whose children do not visit them, or the poor widows and widowers who spend their holidays alone, or the sick with no one to care for them, or the child with no playmates. If we have known that loneliness or seen it in others, then perhaps we can catch a glimpse of what Christ endured, but we must magnify the loss and pain.
Loneliness found its mark and expressed itself on the cross in Jesus’ final words. “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” is the eternal question of the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). This Good Friday the burden of loneliness falls upon quite a number within the Church. I am reminded of what then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, meditating upon Jesus before Pilate: “Evil draws its power from indecision and concern for what other people think” (Way of the Cross 2005). There are many who suffer just as our Lord did, before an ambivalent Pilate and a hysterical crowd. There are victims who still suffer and to whom every help must be extended. There are also those who suffer because of the frenzy of public opinion, because of the secularists with their agendas, and because of those who profit from the misfortune of others. There is shouting. There is inaccuracy. There is a lack of reason. Justice is trampled underfoot, and it is “weakness, cowardice and fear” (ibidem) that allow it to be so. Christ experienced it before Pilate. The Church experiences now.
Then something truly miraculous happens. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are the opening words of Psalm 22. We must read “the rest of the story.” A transformation takes place in that psalm. The final words of the psalm are radically different from the first. The psalm ends with these words: “And I will live for the Lord; my descendants will serve you. The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance you have brought” (Psalm 22:31-32). What a remarkable transformation? A psalm that begins with an outpouring of lonely anguish ends with a triumphant rejoicing. Why? What has taken place?
Nothing less than redemption. We might call it meaning. The Suffering Servant of Isaiah was not left alone in his loneliness. Loneliness has a reason for existing. His loneliness has meaning. He may have been “spurned” and “avoided,” but “…it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured, while we thought of him as stricken, as one smitten by God and afflicted” (Isaiah 53:4). Loneliness exists so that Jesus by His loneliness can transform our loneliness and redeem us. Christ is lonely, so that the loneliness of the human heart can find a home and be redeemed. The Suffering Servant on the cross is actually a redeemer because His sufferings are redeeming. He saves us from sin, which is the ultimate “loneliness,” cutting ourselves off from God. His loneliness becomes the means of redeeming others from loneliness. “He was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins, upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed” (Isaiah 53:5).
Jesus transforms loneliness. Jesus redeems loneliness. He gives it meaning. Loneliness, like death and everything else that pains the human heart, can never be the same again once Christ takes them to Himself on the cross. On the cross, every suffering of the human heart, mind, and soul is opened to meaning through Christ’s redemptive purpose. For this reason, the sacred author of the Letter to the Hebrews can say, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way…. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Hebrews 4:15, 5:8-9).
The act of obedience is when we take the sufferings of our hearts and souls and bring them to the cross. This is why a priest chose that quotation from Isaiah for his chalice. He trod the winepress alone with Christ. The chalice that would bear the Blood of Christ, in the representation of the sacrifice of Calvary, would lift up whatever would be his trials. At the cross the sacramental life of the Church assures us of the reality of what it is we believe. There at the foot of the cross we lift up with trembling hands all the weaknesses we can no longer bear. There we bring them, and there at the cross Christ reaches down to take up, as a perfect offering, not only the mess of human weakness but also the one who is weak. The loneliness of human weakness has opened the heart of God’s eternal grace and love, and loneliness has crossed the threshold of hope.