Homily for Good Friday - Participation In the Cross

 

Homily for Good Friday

March 29, 2024

A Reason To Suffer

 

            Where there’s love, sacrifice is easy.

            Well, perhaps not easy, but where there’s love, suffering takes on meaning and purpose. Christ’s suffering, of course, has the deepest meaning: it demonstrated the depths of God’s love for us; it paid back the debt we owed due to our sins and thereby opened for us the gift of salvation. But one other effect of the Cross is that it gives meaning to our own suffering and death. No longer do we have to cry out with Job, “Why have You done this to me?” No longer do we have to cry out with the millions of innocent victims of every age and time, “Is God silent, absent?” We have an answer – and the answer is the Cross.

            The modern world sees suffering as meaningless, and we ought to avoid it at all costs. Euthanasia has been legalized in ten states across the country, because people see no reason to suffer. The core of our modern drug epidemic is that people want a quick-and-easy fix to the suffering of everyday life. How much of our entertainment industry and social media is really aimed at distracting people from their daily burdens?

            But in light of the Cross, human suffering finds its ultimate meaning, in two ways.

            First, suffering becomes the concrete artform of love. St. Padre Pio says that “The proof of love is to suffer for the one you love.” When we look at the Cross, we realize that love is not a warm, fuzzy feeling – but rather three cold, hard nails and two beams of wood. But this is love, because it was borne for us – and so suffering becomes a gift when it is borne out of love.

            There was a young saint from Italy in the early 1900s named (Servant of God) Guiseppe Ottone. He was born into a tragic situation – his mother was unwed and wanted to abort him, but her friends urged her to give him up for adoption. The adoptive family was tough, too – alcoholic, abusive father. But the saving grace was Guiseppe’s adoptive mother, who was kind and taught the boy about the Lord. Guiseppe loved prayer, visiting the Blessed Sacrament, and making pilgrimages, but in every other respect was a normal boy. Sadly, the mother got struck with a serious illness. The doctors gave her very little chance to live. On the day of his mother’s surgery, twelve-year-old Giuseppe was walking with some friends, very concerned about his mother, when he happened to see a holy card of the Blessed Mother blowing in the wind. He picked it up, kissed it, and said aloud, “I will happily offer my life if my mother is well.” Immediately, he fell to the ground unconscious, and his friends rushed him to the hospital. Sadly he died a couple of days later – but his mother recovered and lived until she was 88. His love was made incarnate in sacrificing his life for hers – and he gained Heaven in the process!

            But suffering can also be used to help Jesus save souls. St. Paul tells us Christians that we are to “make up in our flesh what is lacking in the suffering of Christ.” But what could be lacking in Christ’s sufferings? Weren’t they perfect? Yes – but we as members of the Body of Christ, the Church, can continually unite ourselves to Christ’s redemptive act. Jesus Christ suffered two thousand years ago on a Cross – but Jesus also wants to suffer in Connecticut in 2024 through you, if you allow Him the privilege. Our suffering, united to His, makes manifest His saving death in our modern world, and allows us to be co-redeemers with Him.

            Throughout the Church’s history, God has allowed certain souls to embrace a great deal of suffering for love of Him. They are called victim souls – often mystics who experienced parts of His passion, or other sufferings. St. Padre Pio had the wounds of Christ on his hands, feet, and side – known as the “stigmata”. St. Gemma Galgani used to feel all of the agonies of Christ’s Passion on Fridays. Mother Teresa experienced the deep darkness of the soul, feeling abandoned by God as a way of participating, interiorly, in His sufferings. These are not signs that God has abandoned them, but rather that God esteems them so highly that they are granted a share in His most precious cross. They – and we – become His coworkers and intimate friends when we partake of the Cross. As St. Therese of Lisieux said, “The greatest honor that God can pay to anyone is not to give him much, but to ask much from him.”

            My friends, throughout human history, men and women have wrestled with the problem of evil and suffering. Why does God allow it? What does it mean? But as Pope St. John Paul II said, “Love is the fullest answer to the question of the meaning of suffering. This answer has been given by God to man in the Cross of Jesus Christ.”