Apart from Holy Saturday, Good Friday is the strangest day of the year. For Christians, it is a day that naturally lends itself to quiet contemplation. Ideally, quietly contemplating Christ’s crucifixion is the best way to spend Good Friday.
The perennial question of whether or not it was necessary for Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God made-man-for-us to die in this horrible way cannot be answered simply. Love and death seem to go together. In sacred scripture a verse from the Song of Songs makes this clear:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,His passion and descent into hell demonstrate Jesus Christ’s fierce longing for us. Because of his death, we can be assured that he is with us even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.2
as a seal upon your arm;
For Love is strong as Death,
longing is fierce as Sheol.
Its arrows are arrows of fire,
flames of the divine1
“In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”3 It is because we are loved that we can, in turn, fulfill God’s command to love God by loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. Otherwise, love is too great a risk for us most of the time.
In the theology of the Letter to the Hebrews, one of the lengthier books of our uniquely Christian scriptures, we do not find a doctrine of merit by good works. “Nor is there any suggestion of a recompense for services rendered.”4 Rather, we find love “which must issue in good works if it is real love. Love brings its own reward, both now and in the future.”5 Love is the end in itself.
Failure to love, too, brings its own reward or, rather, its own punishment. It is really both a non-Christian and un-Christian idea to think each person’s suffering is somehow divine justice for their sins. But, in reality, “the punishment for sin is a self-inflicted punishment by humanity on humanity.”6 While karma is real, it has nothing to do with love and so nothing of grace about it.
What is karma but the cosmic projection of the lex talonis, which demands an-eye-for-an-eye and a tooth-for-a-tooth? Let’s face it, nothing seems more natural to us than this. Jesus came to abolish the lex talonis and to establish divine order, the order of grace. How does this happen? It happens by doing God’s will on earth as it is done in heaven, to quote a prayer we pray together frequently.
In a book-length interview published some years ago, discussing his faith, Bono of U2 stated:
Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts… the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff7Love interrupts karma, interrupts humanity’s punishment of humanity, which piles sin on top of sin. When contemplated, the Cross of Christ interrupts and disrupts our normal ways of thinking and acting.
Establishing the divine order, ushering in God’s reign, is the mission of the Church. We sometimes fail in our mission quite catastrophically, as history clearly shows. Hence, it is by grace that Christ does not abandon his Bride. Bono, in the same interview, also said,
Let's not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church…The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there8Indeed, we have a high priest who sympathizes with our weakness and who is indulgent of our forgetfulness, who forgives our trespasses, thus enabling us to forgive others when they trespass against us. We have a high priest who continues to be really present among us and, if we let him, is present in us, helping us to live gracefully, that is, in a non-punishing way.
God’s Son, while in the flesh, learned obedience from what he suffered. This is to state the matter too abstractly. Putting into some context requires us to remember that in the garden Jesus pleaded with the Father to spare him what he suffered. Nonetheless, “For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God."9
What was the joy that lay before Christ Jesus? Nothing other than love of God and love of neighbor. But Christ was not content to merely makes us his neighbors. Through Baptism he makes us children of the Father, his sisters and brothers, thus joining us together in a bond of profound love.
Through Christ’s passion and death, we begin to see that love is not merely as strong as death but that love is stronger than death.
1 Song of Songs 8:6.↩
2 Psalm 23:4.↩
3 1 John 4:10.↩
4 Hugh Montefiore, A Commentary on The Epistle to the Hebrews, 111.↩
5 Ibid.↩
6 James P. Mackey, Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and Its Future among Religions, 115.↩
7 “Bono: Grace Over Karma,” Christianity Today, 1 August 2005, accessed 2 April 2021. ↩
8 Ibid.↩
9 Hebrews 12:2.↩
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