Triduum Sacrum: Good Friday

Triduum Sacrum: Good Friday 2015 – Cycle B Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12; Psalm 31; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1 – 19:42

In Islam, the Qur’an describes Jews and Christians as “people of the book” because along with Muslims we believe in the one God revealed to Abraham.

How paradoxical that thirteen centuries later, in the wake of the executions of 21 Coptic Orthodox Christians, ISIS released a gruesome video entitled “A Message in Blood to the Nation of the Cross.” I expect that for ISIS the reference to “the Nation of the Cross” has little sense beyond a generic designation for Christianity. What is shown in the video is Islamic State executioners on a Libyan beach beheading the Coptic men because they are Christians, with a caption declaring: “The people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church.”

Unbeknownst to ISIS they speak a truth more profound than they or we may realize.

We Christians are “the people of the cross…” Not the domesticated and harmless symbol on our church buildings or that mark objects that we set aside for sacred purposes nor that which act as pious devotion in the form of jewelry or a rushed and often thoughtless tracing over ourselves when we pray. Rather I am referring to the cross as the experience of intersecting lives: our self and another person. Whenever the lives of two people cross (interesting that we use that word, ‘cross’) there is revealed the mystery that occurred not just on the Friday we call Good but the mystery between Jesus and…

• …the woman of Samaria, who went and told others of Jesus.

• The young rich man who walked away from Jesus sad.

• The man who was given sight at the pool of Siloam.

• The woman caught in the act of adultery who was delivered from death and sent home.

• The children Jesus played with, blessed

•             and whose lives he proclaimed as the living Kingdom of God.

• There was the centurion whose slave was ill.

• The young boy who brought forward some bread and fish, hardly enough with which to feed anyone.

• The woman whose burdened heart overflowed in tears that washed the feet of Jesus which she then dried with her hair.

• Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea and his counterpart, Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee.

All experiences of lives intersecting; the many crosses of Jesus. Calvary was just the place where all these experiences were brought and bound together and presented to God.

Two lives that, even in passing or between strangers, change each of the individuals as they continue to travel on their respective journeys. I wonder, how Jesus was changed with each of his encounters?

The life of a priest is especially filled with such experiences.

• A night call to the hospital or nursing home and when you go to visit and follow-up the next day the patient is: gone home, transferred – died.

• A poignant confession by a person who has not been to the Sacrament in a lengthy time.

• An unexpected person at the door.

In all these instances, the two of us will never encounter each other again. But we walk away from each other somehow different. Have you had such experiences? Are some of those people vividly etched in your memory even after a long time; even if you don’t remember much of the experience? “Life intersecting” is what it means to be “the people of the cross”. This is the essence of the Christian message: the cross of all things – an instrument of torture and death – but at the same time as the crossroads of eternity and time, as the meeting point of people’s lives; as the occasion for glory, as the place where the mighty heart of God was broken that the healing power of God could flow through our lives into a broken world. [See The Life of Jesus, Buechner, Boltin, Weathervane Books, New York, 1974; page 177]

I wonder, will the ISIS executioners someday remember that the last words they heard in their encounter with these Coptic Orthodox Christians was “Lord Jesus Christ”?