Saintly Wisdom on Good Friday

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“And Jesus having cried out with a loud voice, gave up the ghost. And the veil of the temple was rent in two, from the top to the bottom. And the centurion who stood over against him, seeing that crying out in this manner he had given up the ghost, said: Indeed this man was the son of God.” —Mark 15:37-39

Today is Good Friday 2024, the day on which we remember Christ’s Passion and death by Crucifixion nearly two millennia ago. Without the sacrificial death of the God-man Jesus, the gates of Heaven would have remained closed, and mankind would still be enslaved to sin, without salvation.

Crucifixion was a particularly brutal kind of death, reserved by the Romans for despised criminals, humiliating and painful in the extreme. You can read a fascinating medical analysis of just what Jesus suffered. But on top of that He bore the burden of all our sins; He felt every tragedy, every loss, every injury, every crime, every death. No mere human could have done it, only a man who was also God. St. Catherine of Siena, fired by the thought of this sacrifice of Christ for us, wrote, “Embrace Jesus crucified, loving and beloved, and in him you will find true life because He is God made man. Let your heart and your soul burn with the fire of love drawn from Jesus on the Cross!”

Indeed, mystery though it is, the crucifix is truly the ultimate symbol of love. “But we,” wrote St. Paul (1 Cor. 1:23-25), “preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness: But unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

It is a paradox to all those who are not Christian (and now even to some who profess to be Christian) that the crucifix should be a symbol of love and victory, but so it is. And we must learn from the crucifixion to take up our crosses and follow Christ, to imitate His patience in suffering. “The cross is the school of love,” said St. Maximilian Kolbe, who died in a Nazi concentration camp so another prisoner could live. And St. Paul of the Cross enthused, “The Passion of Christ is the greatest and most stupendous work of Divine Love.”