Good Friday 2017

Where Once There Was Love

This is a day like no other. For anyone who tries to make sense out of life and for those who are trying to grapple with meaning – this day has it all. It is the finest play, poem and pageant that has ever been conceived. For some the conception of this event remains only in the realm of myth for may others it occupies a space we call truth and as such is dissolves every other attempt for ultimate truth.

Today, many will try to emulate the path that the man Jesus took.  The re-living of this event takes many forms. There is liturgy, pilgrimage and pageant which strives to bring one into the events ultimate mystery. For some it is a matter of ignoring, for others it is a time for observing, for others again it is a necessary metaphysical plunging into the sinews of life.

Good Friday is for many a day that creates an opportunity to make sense of the gift or the burden that we call life. It is especially an opportunity to make sense of all those things that that the world as we know it can’t absorb. It often provides a space for the real self to be even more real so it can experience healing and life.

The world today invites everything to have an image. This is the language of the market but it has been absorbed by many as a way of existing. What was made for the transient and fickle market place has become a modus operandi for a lot of people. This is not the way life should be, but this is the way it has become be it consciously or unconsciously.

Today, in liturgy we find a figure who was beyond an image that anyone could create or project. Any self-induced sense of importance was stripped away. Properly articulated today is life in its rawest and most abject. In the strangest of ways it shows how life can only be lived in the context of love, real love, that steps over convention, narcissism and self-seeking. Anything can be undergone, anything can be endured in the name of love.

The antithesis of this is true also and it is very much part of today’s deepest reality which is how infinitely more difficult life is when love has been stolen or displaced by denial, anger, hurt and selfishness. The absence of love makes things futile. The absence of love take purpose away. The absence of love destroys joy. Life’s experience is all the most bitter when one can recall the fact that ‘Where once there was love’ there is now nothing or even something else. This was the most hazardous part of the journey for the man Jesus today. When this happens in our lives it is the most hazardous journey too.

The fact that one who claimed to be God stepped into this space makes that God all the more real, all the more necessary and all the more accessible.  To walk with him today means to step beyond image, to embrace what is raw, to wave good-bye to what is false so that our lives can be blessed with real and ever- lasting love.