Good Friday

Now with the whole Church we begin the silence of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the silence of night, the silence of the cross, the silence of death. It is a silence in which we must confront deep within our hearts, the drama of Jesus, weighed down by pain, by evil, by human sin - a man rejected, oppressed, downtrodden, a man destroyed by my sins.

The cross seems a sign of the final defeat of the One who brought light to those immersed in darkness, the One who spoke of the power of forgiveness and of mercy, the One who asked us to believe in God’s infinite love for each human person. Despised and rejected by men, he becomes “a man of suffering, acquainted with infirmity, one from whom others hide their faces” (Is 53:3).

But the Church calls us look more closely at that man - crucified between earth and heaven. This is not the weak at the mercy of the strong, this is not a victim of cruel fate. This is God choosing freely to lower himself into the darkest, most painful and most sinful corner of our lives and whilst not taking away our freedom offering us the sure hope that transformation is possible. Revealing to us that in every situation of our lives, our history and our world, God is able to vanquish death, sin and evil, and to give us new, risen life. In the Son of God’s death on the cross is new hope for life, and for this reason we dare to pray and to venerate that cross.