Homilies

March 21, 2008
Good Friday
Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-1919:42
Abbot John Denburger, OCSO

How can anyone ever comprehend, ever fathom the Mystery we celebrate everyday and especially today? God became a man, like us in all things but sin, born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died and was buried - the truth we recite in the Creed. We can recite that truth so thoughtlessly, so rapidly that we can skim over this awesome act of God’s providence as if we were reciting the alphabet or the times table! Sad to say, our lives can reflect such superficial acknowledgment of God’s infinite love and infinite wisdom.

“We adore You, O Christ, and we bless You because by Your holy cross You have redeemed the world” - a prayer familiar to many of us - “You have redeemed the world” - if God had willed it, this redeeming could have been done by a divine command - done in an instant but it wasn’t! Rather, in God’s decision, this redeeming was done by a life, a most holy life, that changed forever the course of history. It changed hearts, our hearts or we would not be here today.

Standing we listened in grave silence to our brothers singing the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to John. Today, I offer you some thoughts on two of Jesus’ cries, both of which came from His depths shortly before He bowed His head and gave up His Spirit: “I thirst” and “It is finished.”

All through His life Jesus endured a thirst, a double thirst. He thirsted for His beloved Father. To Mary and Joseph, He declared:“Why did you search for Me? Did you not know I had to be in my Father’s house?” To disciples, to friends, even to enemies He confessed, He prayed a kind of litany of thirst: “Father, glorify Your Name! Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Father, not my will but Yours be done. Father into Your hands I commend My spirit!” Throughout His life, one name summed up His unquenchable thirst “Father”.

And secondly, Jesus, with equal passion, thirsted for people. He declared it openly: “I have come to seek out and to save the lost” and people like Levi the tax collector, the woman taken in adultery, the good thief, the Samaritan woman who at Jacob’s well heard Jesus say, “I am thirsty” - these and others and we are the subjects and objects of His thirst. “I have come that they have life and life in abundance.” “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you.”

The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is a passion of thirst, of love, of desire even to death and as such exceeds our comprehension and yet, because we are in Christ, His thirst dwells in us. We bear Him within us and, therefore, we bear His sacred thirst - an internal flame that needs to be stirred up, to be directed, focused. Jesus put it all together in the great commandment: “love God above all things and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Let what is within come forth and live it to the full. Today, on this good day, we celebrate His passion, His love for us - a thirst lived to the full, carried to the end. We hear it in His final words, “It is finished!” What is finished? His total gift of self through suffering to death! Yet, the gift lives on, perdures and encompasses us - His love, grace, Spirit is ours.

As for us, you and me, none of us can say of our life in grace “It is finished!” We are on the journey of this redeeming love, living in and out of a special, a sacred thirst - the thirst of Jesus Christ proclaimed by the cross and present in the Holy Eucharist.

We will kiss the cross in silence - we prostrate, or bow, and in an intimate gesture we kiss it in gratitude, in intimate belief. We receive the Lord in Holy Communion with the same reverence - we taste Him with gratitude, in intimate belief. We experience His thirst personally, intimately. With all our unworthiness we receive, taste, are penetrated by the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ.

On this Good Friday, we have gathered as good Catholics, as men and women of faith to listen, to pray, to reverence, to receive and then we will be on our way. And then what? To live the thirst, to continue our journey to completion- that’s what! - because we are of Christ, and He is of God. No other reason is necessary.