Good Friday
A Word about the Readings
by Father Gethin
(The readings may be found here)
The Cross is the cross-roads of our story, and God’s. All human experience and history make their way, inevitably, to that final confrontation of the soul with God and His good-purpose as our Creator. If not before, the end of our mortal lives brings us to the foot of the Cross, and our account of that event will be our final judgment: if we see a deranged fool whose death sentence was inevitable, so shall we also find ourselves condemned; if we see a criminal, so shall we be judged; if we find a man worthy of scorn and shame, so shall we be found; if we see an innocent man, His innocence will be shared with us; and if we look and behold the Son of God, subject only to the love and goodness of the Father, so too shall be our inheritance, in the divine adoption of sons.
The message of the Gospel is just this: we need not wait for that dreadful day of reckoning, when all things about us are suddenly brought to final and terrible judgement. We may meet the day of our condemnation here and now, before the last day. And by way of opening ourselves to the story of Christ’s suffering, and ultimately to the suffering Messiah Himself, we may come to know and to receive what He offers there, not to our perpetual agony, but as the condition of our eternal salvation. The end of all things is at hand, He told them, and before the passing of His generation, all would be accomplished. Come and see, see how gracious is His love for us, and see too, how willful and wretched is our disobedience, our selfish disinterest in love; and be changed by the vision. Be loved.