The Cross – Gateway to Eternity

They took charge of Jesus, and carrying his own cross he went out of the city…to Golgotha where they crucified him… John 19:17

G - "Cheer up," said the man to his terribly seasick friend aboard a ship, "seasickness never killed anybody."

"Don’t tell me that," was his reply. "It’s only the hope of dying that has kept me alive this long."

As someone who has been seasick on what at the time seemed like "the ocean voyage from hell," I can certainly understand how that poor guy must have felt, but most of us don’t look on death quite so favorably. Most of us probably agree with Woody Allen’s quip, "I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens."

As Christians, our faith assures us that the end of earthy life is nothing to fear. Cosmic events occurring in Jerusalem during the first Holy Week won us that assurance. Now, more than two thousand years later, we may be fearful about the circumstances of our death, but need not be fearful about death itself.

Today we commemorate the Crucifixion of the Son of God, who in obedience to his Father’s law of love suffered a cruel death on the cross. For believers, what happened on Good Friday, coupled with what happened on Easter Sunday, destroyed the power of death. The Resurrection transformed it forever -- from something meaningless to be dreaded, into something meaningful to be welcomed. After the Empty Tomb, death remains the last chapter of time, but becomes the first chapter of eternity.

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T - For the second time this week we proclaim the passion of Our Lord. Palm Sunday’s gospel reading was from Mark. Today’s is from John. If you were to compare John’s perspective on the suffering and death of Jesus to Matthew’s, Mark’s, and Luke’s, you’d discover that it’s decidedly different. For John, the passion is Jesus’ greatest hour – the hour he is lifted up, the hour of his ultimate glorification. It’s the reality of the glorified Christ that Peter, James, and John got a glimpse of on the Mount of the Transfiguration.

In the other three gospels, Jesus is depicted as a victim, as one unjustly condemned and disgraced by being put to death in a manner reserved for hardened criminals. In John, however, Jesus is portrayed as the Son of God in control of the whole experience. He is the king who reigns from the throne of the cross. No one takes his life from him; he lays it down of his own free will. After uttering his last words, "It is finished," he bows his head and hands over his spirit. This dramatizes John’s theology of a God-sent Messiah who has completed his mission on earth. Jesus became flesh to reveal God’s love for us and his death is the final, climatic moment of that revelation.

John by no means minimizes the suffering of Christ. His story of the passion is told with many of the same details used by the other evangelists, but the interpretation is different; the tone is one of triumph rather than defeat. That’s why, since ancient times, the Church has selected John’s version of the passion to be read each year on this day that we call Good Friday, while alternating the passion narratives from the other three evangelists on Palm Sunday. The life that began in a manger ended on a cross. But thereafter, what the caterpillar calls death, God calls a butterfly.

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G - Today, close to a third of the world’s population venerates the cross as a symbol of salvation, instead of despising it as an instrument of torture and death. For believers, death is not the end, but a transition. It’s the gateway to eternal life in the spirit. This explains why today is called Good Friday, which to non-believers would be an absurd way to describe what happened on Calvary.

In the early ‘60’s I visited New York City where Tony was attending college. I can still recall what was scrawled on a wall of the subway station across from his campus. There next to a poster for Levy’s Jewish Rye Bread someone had spray painted -- "Don’t take life so seriously, you won’t get out alive." That message struck me as profound then and strikes me even more so now that I’m a tad bit older and hopefully wiser. Over the years I’ve come to understand its meaning better. God doesn’t redeem us from bodily death, but does redeem us from the fear of death, so we don’t have to clutch frantically to life as if it were all there is.

The death of a loved one challenges our most basic assumptions about life. Death seems so final. How could anything be greater than that? But death is final only from the point of view of those left behind. Paradoxically, the tears of sadness we shed over our loss are, at the same time, tears of joy for their gain.  St. Paul in Romans put it this way: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come…will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

It’s normal to feel grief at the death of a loved one. And the journey from grief to healing takes time and is never simple or direct. There are side trips, detours, maybe even a wrong turn or two. But like a river that twists and turns as it flows to the sea, grief always knows the way home.  And we know that our grief places us in good company – the human family. To be human and alive, after all, means to suffer and die. Not even Christ was spared from that reality.

All of us have our own personal crosses to bear. What varies from person to person is merely the type and weight of each one. Our fellow parishioners who will soon carry into church the cross for us to reverence have recently borne or are bearing now particularly heavy crosses. But because of the triumph of the cross in first century Jerusalem, they and we know that when the dark night ends, a new day will dawn and Eternal Light will shine through. We who are believers know that the love of God, demonstrated magnificently through the Son, is greater than suffering and death.

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T  - Today we grieve as we remember what was done to Our Lord. On Sunday, however, the anniversary of the day that death lost its "sting," we’ll rejoice as we celebrate what Our Lord’s Resurrection has done for us.

Here’s how the silent film star Mary Pickford described death from a believer’s point of view. I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails in the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she is only a ribbon or white cloud, just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, "There, she’s gone!" Gone where? Gone from my sight – that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight – to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her; just at the moment when someone at my side says, "There! She’s gone!" there are other voices beyond the horizon ready to take up the glad shout, "There she comes!" And that, friends, is dying.

Behind the altar of the recently renovated St. Louis Church in the village there’s a beautiful stainglass window. The inner frame of window is a cross on which the crucified Christ hangs majestically, not in defeat, but in triumph. It’s the Christ depicted in John’s gospel. The nail heads are visible, but the body appears to be suspended in mid-air. His eyes are closed, expression serene. His arms are outstretched, as if inviting us to cross the threshold of time. As if inviting us, at journey’s end, to come home.

A ninety-year-old woman, a priest’s mother, was taken to the hospital with a number of physical problems. Her son visited her and tried to cheer her up by saying, "Now, Mom, don’t worry – you are going to be home in a few days." She replied brightly, "Oh, I know that. Just don’t know which home.
 

Gloria and Anthony Sciolino

 Good Friday

April 18, 2003. (Cycle B)

Isaiah 52:13-53:12/40

Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9

John 18:1-19:42.