Holy Week Meditations

Mar 29, 2024 by Jill

GOOD FRIDAY

LITURGICAL THEME FOR THE DAY: Today the whole Church mourns the death of our Savior. This is traditionally a day of sadness, spent in fasting and prayer. The title for this day varies in different parts of the world: “Holy Friday” for Latin nations, Slavs and Hungarians call it “Great Friday,” in Germany it is “Friday of Mourning,” and in Norway, it is “Long Friday.” Some view the term “Good Friday” (used in English and Dutch) as a corruption of the term “God’s Friday.” This is another obligatory day of fasting and abstinence. In Ireland, they practice the “black fast,” which is to consume nothing but black tea and water.

All of this is to try to find a way to illustrate that today is a day to deeply consider our relationship to God, to the Crucifixion, and to the power of penance and forgiveness. How can we turn our face to God? Good Friday is the day on which all of us should consider how we can individually and collectively turn our faces towards God and how the promise of the Resurrection will enable our souls to continue to “bend to the East” even though we as physical beings continue that journey. Let us consider, on this day, what we must do if we are to move to forgiveness and what must happen across our hearts and homes before we can fully do so.

BIBLICAL MEDITATION OF THE DAY:  The summary message of Good Friday is that Jesus was condemned, crucified, bled, and died. But behind these scenarios lie what gave him the greatest agony, namely, the denial by those he taught and healed and the deliberate denial and betrayal by Judas and Peter his disciples. Imagine what Jesus was feeling when Judas walked out that door and darkness fell. Imagine how he felt, when he looked to Peter to stay by him, and in spite of his earlier promise to do so, declined and denied him.   What suffering!

Peter, while much loved by the Lord, and having been privy to the exchange regarding Judas, still doesn’t seem to get it! His desire for ‘insider knowledge’ super – cedes his desire to simply listen to and obey the Lord. This leads him to an offer he would not have been able to keep, as his later actions attest. With knowledge aforethought, Christ provides an important lesson in foretelling Peter’s fear once the reality of Christ’s mission is revealed.

Like Peter, we can see only what Judas did but fail to realize that we deny and betray him in so many ways: we doubt some of his teachings and pick and choose them, we deny Him our time – we have time for everything but for God.  Jesus is worth more than billions, but Judas sold him on discount at 30 pieces of silver. Like Judas we sell Jesus at a discount when we equate him to humans and prefer human laws to the laws of God, when we receive the Eucharist without going to Confession, when we are ashamed to talk about him before our relations and friends or pray in a public place.

PRAYER OF THE DAY: O God, who by the Passion of Christ your Son, our Lord, abolished the death inherited from ancient sin by every succeeding generation, grant that just as, being conformed to him, we have borne by the law of nature the image of the man on earth, so by the sanctification of grace we may bear the image of the Man of heaven. We ask this through Christ Our Lord. Amen

ANCIENT WISDOM/PRESENT GRACE: “The Cross, is wood which lifts us up and makes us great … The Cross uprooted us from the depths of evil and elevated us to the summit of virtue”-St John Chrysostom.”

HOLY HYMN – Were You There? by the Gracias Choir

HOLY WEEK DISCIPLINE: This is a very profound day of spiritual intimacy with the Lord. Some of the traditional ways to express that are:  1) Pray the Stations of the Cross.
2) Commit to a day of fasting and abstinence, 3) pray in the presence of the cross as a forgiven sinner – and bring along a person who you have forgiven.

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