10 April 2020 - Good Friday

      In Spanish, we call this day Viernes Santa - Holy Friday.  But, in English, we call today Good Friday.  We use the word “good” on this solemn day because on this day we remember how much God loves us.  On this day, we commemorate the passion of Jesus for us. The suffering and death of Jesus is God’s entry into all that we suffer as human beings. Jesus not only knows and understands, he is with us in our suffering and death. Jesus’ journey to the cross, his death and resurrection - they are transformative for our own sufferings, our own crosses. Today, we commemorate Christ as the suffering servant. Through Christ’s cross and death, we are freed from the power of sin and from our earthly deaths.  

       Today, with our stay at home order preventing us from attending our Holy Week liturgies at our parishes, we have asked our families to gather for this Good Friday liturgy in their homes and to venerate together the cross upon which Christ died. Back in the 7th century, the holy Church in Rome adopted this practice of the adoration of the cross from the Church in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, the Church had preserved a fragment of wood from the cross of Christ, which the faithful venerated each year on Good Friday. Tradition passes down that this fragment of the holy cross was discovered by in the year 326 by St Helen, the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine. On Good Friday in Jerusalem, the Bishop would place the relic of the cross on a table in the chapel of the Crucifixion where the faithful would venerate it, as the priest proclaimed, “Behold the wood of the cross."  Veneration of the cross does not mean that we adore the material image of the cross.  Rather, we venerate and honor what the cross represents to us as disciples of Christ.  Kneeling before the cross or genuflecting in front of the cross, we pay it great honor for what it represents in our salvation. The cross is inseparable from the sacrifice Christ made for us.  In venerating the cross, we honor and adore Christ. But our adoration of the cross goes beyond our bow and our genuflection. We honor the cross by our actions: loving our enemy, letting go of past hurts, asking for forgiveness and being able to forgive others, working toward conversion and repentance for the ways we have sinned and the ways we have given way to temptation. As we proclaim each Friday in the stations of the cross to Christ our Lord: We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.