Good Friday

During His earthly ministry, Jesus in deepest agony looks upon the city of peace, holy Jerusalem, the city of the great King, His city and cries out: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing” (Lk 13:33–34). This is not agony over His impending death, but the agony that arises when He sees that His own people would reject Him, His message, and the benefits of His death for them. Did He not come to his own and his own would not receive Him (Jn 1:11)? How passionately He is concerned for His people, people like us. I can’t help but think of the hauntingly beautiful Improperia drawn from Jeremiah, which we will hear again tonight: “Thus says the Lord: What have I done to you, O my people, and wherein have I offended you? Answer me. For I have conquered all your foes, and you have given me over and delivered me to those who persecute me. For I have fed you with my word and refreshed you with living water, and you have given me gall and vinegar to drink. I have raised you up out of the prison house of sin and death, and you have delivered up your Redeemer to be scourged. For I have redeemed you from the house of bondage, and you have nailed your Savior to the cross. O my people!” In His agony, tears of frustration and sorrow run down his face tracking tiny rivulets of agony on His holy countenance. He is thinking not of Himself in His agony, but us.

Nor are these just crocodile tears powered by mock sympathy. Unlike us, Jesus never suffers compassion fatigue for sufferers. He suffers along with them and most importantly, in their place. Compassion is His very name! We see Him referring to his mission. He’s not thinking of some event far in the future. “I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following, for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem” (Lk 13:33). How ironic that the God who knows all things, whom our catechism calls omniscient, is never self-regarding in His knowing. He’s not thinking about Himself. He is thinking about us. He is regarding us. Oh, what a comfort this is in the midst of our suffering to know that our Lord Jesus, who himself suffered, is with us! The Thomas à Kempis hymn, O Love How Deep has it just right:

How different this makes Jesus from the worldly arbiters of good and evil. As I was reading again the passion narrative in St. Matthew, I was struck by the difference between how unbelievers deal with sin and God’s way of dealing with it. When Judas realizes that he has betrayed innocent blood, he confesses to the authorities of the Sanhedrin. With a horrifying worldly logic, the Sanhedrin says to Judas about his guilt, “See to it yourself” (Mt 27:4)! Judas receives not absolution but the final solution of suicide (Mt 27:5). Those who mocked our Savior on the cross called to Him, “Save yourself!” Our God never says such a thing. He never demands that we take care of our sin ourselves. He bears our sin. He comes to save sinners. He dines with them at an altar that He spreads with the most precious gifts. Sinners like us become His own. The Physician of souls seeks the sick, patients like us. He never demands that we see to sin ourselves, for that way lies the deepest despair and death. Hopelessness is drowning our culture so that it has become the culture of death.

Rev. Dr. Scott R. Murray

“How great a mystery of word and act it is that Christ wept, that His eyes filled with tears from the anguish of His mind. How did it happen that sorrow should wring tears from His body? What bitter fate, what unendurable pain, could move to a flood of tears the Son of Man who descended from heaven? What was it in Him which wept? God the Word? Or His human soul? For though weeping is a bodily function, the body is but a servant; tears are, as it were, the sweat of the agonized soul. What was the cause of His weeping? Did He owe to Jerusalem the debt of His tears, Jerusalem, the godless murderer of the prophets, whom no suffering could requite for the slaughter of Apostles and Prophets, and the murder of her Lord Himself? He might weep for the disasters and death which befall mankind. However, how could He grieve for the fall of that doomed and desperate race? What, I ask, was this mystery of His weeping? His soul wept for sorrow. Was not it His soul which sent forth the Prophets? Which would so often have gathered the chickens together under the shadow of His wings (Lk 13:34)? However, God the Word cannot grieve. The Spirit cannot weep. His soul could not possibly do anything before the body existed. Yet we cannot doubt that Jesus Christ truly wept.”

Hilary, On the Trinity, 10.5