Tomorrow Lent ends in a fantastic celebration at the Easter Vigil. Today, however, is Good Friday. Today we commemorate Christ's passion and death.
I could reflect on the saddest part of the Good News by giving my thoughts on the stations of the cross, the meaning of Calvary, or even the film by Mel Gibson. But I won't.
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When I was fifteen years old, a classmate of mine was killed in a car accident. His was the first funeral I went to, and the beginning of my experience with death. A year later, my Grampa passed away. This was, for me, the beginning of saying goodbye to those close to me. Another year later my Gramma, his wife, followed him to heaven, and they were both closely followed by Jim Flanagan and Roy Johannson--older men who had taken me on as an employee and made a point to take me under their wing and mentor me, encouraging me to grow up into a hard-working and common-sense man of God. More recently my Dad's mom passed away as well and now Shannyn's dad. By this point grief had mounted on grief, and I would readily admit that I had an inborn hatred of death in and of itself. I ultimately came to believe that death itself embodied the truest enemy of God; whereas Satan was a created being that could be limited, death was the infinite separation from the eternal live inherent in God's nature. I refused to believe that there was anything natural about it. If it were natural, I believed, Christ would never have had to come.
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Roughly 1980 years ago, the streets of Roman-occupied Jerusalem stirred with a sickening sort of commotion: people jeering, weeping, cursing. Soldiers shouted, women mourned, children peeked out curiously as a procession followed the Criminal. Jesus of Nazareth carried the instrument of His own death upon His shoulders, slowly making His way to the edge of the city and up to the place of Skull. He was bloodied and bruised, His blood flowed down together with His own sweat and others' saliva. He had promised eternal life from God, healed the sick, made the lame walk, the blind see, and even brought people back from the dead. Now He was trudging along, barely strong enough to carry His own cross, and He would certainly be dead by the end of the day. Just hours ago, He had stated that nobody could take His life away from Him, but that He would lay it down willingly. Willingly He would break His body, pour His blood; He instituted a ritual for His followers to repeat for ages to come. He embraced His death as to own it, as to change it however He saw fit, and finally one day to undo it. When He finally gave up His spirit, His consciousness and presence together went to the prisons of souls that had passed on to proclaim that death's power was being unravelled. His resurrection verified the success of His conquest.
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Perchance yesterday I picked up my copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and turned randomly to this paragraph:
1009 Death is transformed by Christ. Jesus, the Son of God, also himself suffered the death that is part of the human condition. Yet, despite his anguish as he faced death, he accepted it in an act of complete and free submission to his Father's will. The obedience of Jesus has transformed the curse of death into a blessing.
1010 Because of Christ, Christian death has a positive meaning: "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." "The saying is sure: if we have died with him, we will also live with him." What is essentially new about Christian death is this: through Baptism, the Christian has already "died with Christ" sacramentally, in order to live a new life; and if we die in Christ's grace, physical death completes this "dying with Christ" and so completes our incorporation into him in his redeeming act:
It is better for me to die in (eis) Christ Jesus than to reign over the ends of the earth. Him it is I seek - who died for us. Him it is I desire - who rose for us. I am on the point of giving birth. . . . Let me receive pure light; when I shall have arrived there, then shall I be a man.
And,
1016: By death the soul is separated from the body, but in the resurrection God will give incorruptible life to our body, transformed by reunion with our soul. Just as Christ is risen and lives for ever, so all of us will rise at the last day.
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In Christ the sting of death is gone, and when it comes time for me to face my own, I know that in a strange way it will be a blessing. Death will be undone one day, but dying in Christ, to be with Christ, guarantees now that even as surely as Christ rose victorious over death itself, I will too. This is the reality of those who went on before covered by the Grace of God. I know that I'll see them again one day.
Praise God!
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Rest in God's Peace:
Stephen Wybenga
Bill Durrett
Loraine Durrett
Jim Flanagan
Roy Johannson
Mary Hedges
Barney Brown
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