I’ve been leading this Good Friday service here for more than 20 years, but I’ve never seen the sight I’m looking at now, which is 600 empty places. It seems all wrong, but in a way, maybe it’s not. This liturgy is partly about a deep feeling of emptiness that comes upon all of us.
At the end of this gospel we just heard, everyone has scattered, the entire cast of characters of the gospels has disappeared, there’s a tomb with a stone in front of it, this great city where something amazing was supposed to happen seems suddenly deserted, and night has come. On Good Friday this is where we are.
And yet love is present even in the middle of emptiness and death. Jesus did not live this story to suffer, he did this to show us that there is no place that God isn’t willing to be, no place and no event where God is absent. He did this because love for us was more important than his life. St. Ignatius used to say that we should realize that if each of us were the only person on this earth, Christ still would have done this for us, not so that we will feel guilty but so that we would realize what God’s love is, how it is supposed to change everything about how we see the world. We never see the world right or ourselves right until we experience that love for us, all of us equally. And today is our school for love, not only to learn that we are loved, but how we’re supposed to do it, how far we’re supposed to go. And we love that way because God loved us first.
My mother had an expression, we all have our cross to bear. Sometimes when she said it, it sounded like it meant, if there’s something or someone in your life that you don’t like, tough, you’re stuck with it. But what the cross means isn’t that. It doesn’t mean suffering is good. It means there is always someplace in our life where love is trying to take us that is going to be a very, very hard place to go. It’s hard to love when you’re worried, when you’re beaten down, when you’re suddenly alone, when the world seems like it is in enemy hands. The last thing you feel like you need, or that you would be able to do at a time of emptiness, is to summon the passion to live for others, to bend in a way you don’t want to bend. But we keep going, because we’ve been shown that in the end, that is the kind of love that survives pain and comes out the other side. This man who showed us what love is proved it. Pope Francis this week said love is a creative force that makes connections among the separated, love finds a new way in the darkness, even toward resurrection when it doesn’t seem possible.