Veneration of the crucifix in the Zagreb Cathedral, Croatia. Photo: bigstockphoto.com/zatletic
Good Friday is a significant feast day for Christians. It has had a sense of mourning about it.
As a child, I experienced Good Friday as a tedious day; it seemed interminable. It was not a holiday but a day of sadness and keeping quiet. The liturgy was boring with all those prayers and another reading of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ after listening to it on Palm Sunday. Since Lent was a time for making sacrifices, I thought that going to the 3 pm Good Friday liturgy fulfilled that criteria of making a sacrifice for God.
However, as an adult, I have experienced Good Friday in quite a few different countries and cultures. The liturgy can vary depending on the culture, longer or shorter, depending on what country I was living in. For example, people in Jamaica walked long distances to get to church; once they arrived, they expected to be there for quite some time.
People come to Good Friday in droves. I would suggest that they understand what Good Friday is about - a very human holy time. They know pain and suffering. They know grief and sadness, and they know the darker feelings of despair and profound sorrow. When they come to Church on Good Friday, they can pray and talk to Jesus, who was human like them and felt their pain and emotions. There is a unity of human experience which binds them to Jesus; people know he understands their sufferings. Somehow, words are not needed. People need time to heal; no words are adequate.
One of the difficulties with venerating the Cross during the Good Friday ceremony is the lack of time people have to be at the foot of the Cross. I have been in some churches where the Cross was a massive wooden structure which the young men of the parish manhandled into place in the church. It surpasses the small wooden crosses which are used to move the people through multiple lanes otherwise, the congregation would be in church for a long time.
People come up and hold the Cross or kiss it and place their head against it and their posture is their prayer, the look on their faces is a plea or an acknowledgement of what has happened; maybe since last Easter or going back in time. They could kneel there for ages, lost in their prayer.
The sight of these kneeling people kneeling in prayer is powerful, who knows what their memories and prayers are about? One answer is: if Jesus has done this for love of us, then we know we are loved and forgiven. If we forgive, the challenge is to forgive others because Jesus has set the example.
Several other thoughts come unbidden to my mind and heart: the betrayal of Jesus by one of his trusted friends, his agony in the garden of Gethsemane, his disciples fleeing and leaving him alone to his fate. Most of all the silent figure of Mary the mother of Jesus standing at the foot of his Cross present to his sufferings and death.
Fortunately, the story does not end there but continues three days later.
Columban Fr Gary Walker is currently living at the Columban house in Sandgate, Brisbane.
