Why Good Friday is Good Indeed

Last Wednesday, a parishioner sent me an e-mail asking "Why is Good Friday called 'good'?

He'd have had a better chance of winning the lottery than getting a fast answer from me; Holy Week is just too busy.

So imagine my surprise when another parishioner called this morning to say there was a perfectly good reply to the question in today's Vancouver Sun! Pretty close to the last place I'd look for Christian truth.

But the fact is that the Sun hits the nail squarely on the head. After some interesting history about the name Good Friday, which isn't universal—it's called Mourning Day in German, for instance—the editorial says whatever its origin, and despite the solemn rituals marking this day, "Good Friday is, for Christians, good in every sense of the word."

"After all," the editorial says, "Christianity teaches that Christ's death is not a chance event. Rather, His death was preordained—He was sent to Earth to die for our sins and in so doing, He conquered death and redeemed humanity."

If that were all the newspaper had to say, I'd be very pleased. But there's more to the editorial, and it's even better: because it brings the goodness of Good Friday even closer to each of us.

Here's how it continues. "Christ therefore gave meaning to suffering and death: His sorrows were like a seed—a seed from which He was resurrected and from which a spiritually reborn humanity could flower."

Pure poetry, and the editorial writer adds something I didn't know: that "historically, Good Friday was thought to be a good day for planting seeds." Given the weather today, you gardeners may want to take note of that.

My dear friend Sister Josephine Carney likes to say that "memories are seeds of hope." This afternoon, the liturgy helps remember the terrible sufferings of Jesus. But it's not a history lesson: we are invited to find in his passion and death the seeds of our hope, the seeds that will sprout in the soil of our own sufferings.

The mystery we recall today does not belong only to history, but to this very moment. Blessed John Henry Newman wrote "the Atonement of Christ is not a thing at a distance, or like the sun standing above and separated from us… We are surrounded by an atmosphere and are in a medium, through which His warmth and light flow in upon us on every side."

We all know that seeds cannot flower without sun. In some ways, our Good Friday liturgy is somber, even dark. Yet even in this commemoration of the Lord's death, warmth and light flow in upon us. This is why we dare to offer more prayers of petition today than at any other liturgy of the year—ten solemn intercessions for every imaginable need.

Why do we receive the Eucharist on Good Friday, a day when Mass is not offered? I think it is so that we do not lose touch, even for a moment, with the love that surrounds us, the love in which we exist at all times. The Eucharist makes present the incarnate and crucified Lord, and the risen Lord. Today, and every day, let us remember that—in joy and, especially, in sorrow.


 

My Defeat, God’s Victory (Palm Sunday)

 

I won’t ask what you did for Lent. I haven’t asked anyone that since the time one of our young parishioners replied that he’d given up red meat, cold showers, and alcohol—and then innocently asked me what I’d given up.

Actually, I would be willing to tell you about my failed Lenten resolutions, but all I can really remember is forgetting them!

Has your Lent been like that?  Good resolutions at the start, but not much to brag about at the finish?

If your Lent hasn’t been a great spiritual success, I offer two last-minute proposals.

First, I suggest you give up something for Lent. No, not candy or coffee or dessert—it’s a bit late for that. I suggest we give up trying to please God by our own efforts.

Thinking we can prove ourselves to God is one of the great traps of the spiritual life. It always leads to failure, and to the conclusion that we’ll never make it since we’re just too weak and sinful.

The fact is, God has already done the heavy lifting—God has already made it possible for us to please him: not by our efforts, but by the death of His only Son.

That’s why we read the long and painful story of the Passion twice this week. It’s proof that we don’t need to “achieve” our salvation; in fact, we can’t.  Jesus has done it for us.  In His humanity, our humanity suffered.  In His humanity, our humanity accomplished what needed to be done to reconcile sinful humanity to God.

So even if we’ve felt like losers this Lent, we can be victors. The Passion is the first chapter of the greatest victory in all history. Jesus has shared it with us, and all we need to do is place our hope in him rather than in ourselves.

My second proposal is one I make every year: celebrate fully the sacred Triduum—the three days that take us from Lent to Easter.

The Triduum begins with the evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday. We recall the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood, and Christ’s example of charity as he washed the feet of his apostles.

On Good Friday, of course, we read the Passion for a second time, and enter into it even more fully than we did today, through prayer, fasting, and abstinence. We pray with special fervour for the needs of the whole world and the entire Church.

On Holy Saturday night we celebrate the greatest of all the liturgies in the Church, the Easter Vigil. We mark the Passover from darkness to light, from death to life, and we celebrate the sacraments of Christian initiation. Not surprisingly, when Mass is over we have a party to welcome some ten new members of the Church.

Whether your Lent’s been the best-ever or the worst-ever, do yourself a big spiritual favour and celebrate all three of the Triduum liturgies. God will not disappoint you.

Open the Eyes of My Heart: Mass for the Second Scrutiny

Since we are celebrating the Rite of Christian Initiation with our catechumens this Sunday, the readings used are those of Year A, which are read in conjunction with the Mass for the Second Scrutiny.

It was an electrifying week at our parish. Monday's windstorm knocked a live power line across the driveway, meaning no-one could get in or out. And that's not all—the church, school and rectory had no power, light or heat.

God knew that I wasn't prepared for the shock. So it all happened while I was up in Whistler, blissfully unaware that the schoolchildren were sitting in the dark and poor Father Xavier was finding his away about the house with a flashlight right up till bedtime.

Small wonder that Jesus says we can't work in the dark. We need light to carry on our main activities. You can't study without light, cook without light, or even get around safely without light, which is one of the reasons we had to close the school and find a way to get the children off the property through the back gate.

The crew running the Alpha Course had a challenge even greater than evacuating the school. They were supposed to prepare dinner for more than seventy people—in a kitchen with no windows. The evening centers on a video, which you can't show without power.

But they showed what it means to be children of the light. They lit up the pitch-black kitchen with the little votive candles people light by the statues; they rented a generator; they served dinner by candlelight. In the words of the first chapter of St. John's Gospel, they showed that "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

It's a fair bet that this Monday miracle was a powerful lesson for those at Alpha. Among other things, it showed what happens when people work together with zeal and joy. But more than that, the candlelit dinner reminded everyone at the table of St. Peter's words: "You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts." (2 Pt 1:19b)

But let's turn our attention to a full-blown miracle, the one Jesus works in today's Gospel of the man born blind, which we read today in connection with the rite of scrutiny we are celebrating this morning. What does this miracle teach us all?

We know that light and darkness, day and night, are potent symbols in the Scriptures. Jesus says he is the light of the world, and amazingly he also says that we are the light of the world. St. Paul talks about "unfruitful works of darkness," and about the purifying power of exposing our shameful deeds to the light of day. The night that Jesus speaks about is the night of death, the night that stops in our tracks.

The miracle is a lot less complicated than St. John's rather longwinded account suggests. It's almost homey in its details, and everyone speaks their part plainly and simply. Everyone, that is, except Jesus.

Jesus shows himself to be the perfect Teacher in this miracle. He starts by telling us what he's doing: he is revealing God's works. It's the reason the man was born blind, and it's the reason Jesus heals his blindness: that God's works might be revealed in him.

The day Jesus speaks of is the day of the Lord; the night is Satan's hour when God's mighty works are eclipsed until the Resurrection is shown as God's "supreme and wholly marvelous work," as St. Augustine calls it.

The disciples asked Jesus: "who sinned? The man or his parents?" We know the answer: not him, not them, but us. This healing isn't about one blind beggar but about all of us, blinded by sin and selfishness.

Today's Gospel, used for centuries to prepare men and women for baptism, always makes me think of the line from the hymn "Amazing Grace": I was blind, but now I see. But at the same time, I think of a modern song, with the refrain "Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. I want to see you."

Those of us who are baptized have been called from darkness into light. St. Paul tells us that Christians are "light in the Lord." Lent is a challenge to rekindle the divine fire inside of us by prayer and penance, by taking stock.

St. Paul offers some very concrete advice about self-examination: "Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord." Don't just think about your sins, but try to figure out one or two things you can do to make God glad. Spend some time thinking about what is good and true—and make a plan for positive change. Perhaps we overshot the mark with our Lenten sacrifices, and we were back on Facebook or drinking our Starbucks a week after Ash Wednesday. That doesn't mean we can't shift our Lenten gears and decide to make some positive changes in our lives, right here and now. Try to find out what would please the Lord.

Of course good resolutions aren't the whole story. The Apostle also reminds us that we need to expose our dark side to the healing light of Christ —especially the hidden sins we can't quite face up to. Are we living in the light or skulking around in the dark? Sin can't stand the light; when it's hauled out in the open, repentance follows naturally. The more shame we feel about the sin, the truer this is.

To those preparing for baptism, today's readings aren't so much a challenge as an invitation. By now, the catechumens have been on the journey long enough that Jesus can say to them the same words he said to the man born blind: "You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he." And they are now ready to respond "Lord, I believe."

The Alpha "miracle" turned a flop into a feast; it made light shine in the darkness. We can do the same if the lights went out on our Lent. All it takes is admitting our blindness, and asking the Holy Spirit to lead us "out of the darkness and into God's marvelous light." (1 Pt 2:9b)

Rules Flow From Relationship (Lent 3B)

Please help me out this morning by imagining you missed your best friend's wedding. That's hard to imagine nowadays, with low airfares, but perhaps you were exploring the Amazon or recovering from surgery.

A few months pass, and finally you get together with your friend. "Tell me what marriage is like," you ask him eagerly.

"Oh, it's really amazing," he replies. "I have to come home at night, I don't go on holidays without her, and I put the toilet seat down."

What chances would you give that marriage?

And yet that's the way some people talk about the Christian faith—as if it were more about rules than about a relationship: mostly dos and don'ts.

On the other hand, what chances would you give to a marriage where the husband didn't come home at night, and went on holidays without his wife?

The point is that the basic rules of marriage follow from the relationship; they're not the heart of it but a logical consequence of love. Of course some rules aren't quite so basic: we follow them because the one we love asks us to. "Darling," your friend's wife may have said, "It drives me crazy when you leave the seat up."

Understanding this is terribly important. We had an all-day session of the Alpha Course yesterday, and more than once the video presentation underlined that Christianity is primarily a relationship, not a set of rules. As the Catechism puts it, we are called by baptism into "a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God."

That relationship calls for a certain way of living. But there's a big difference between the rules that come from our relationship with God and the rules that make for a happy marriage—because our spouse is not our Creator. God's rules are not only for our good, but for the good of society and even the planet itself.

Is it an accident that our first reading introduces the Ten Commandments with these words: "I am the Lord… who brought you out of the house of slavery"? God's law opens the door to human freedom, while sin enslaves.

As Pope Benedict said recently, Christian moral teaching is a message of liberation, not of constraint. The Gospel proposes unchanging moral truths precisely as the key to human happiness and "the basis for building a secure future." [Ad limina address to U.S. Bishops, January 19, 2012]

Why was Jesus so angry at the money changers? Because he cares about human happiness. The money changers were cheating the poor, cheating those who were trying to perform a religious duty. And the money-changers had set up their tables in what was called the Court of the Gentiles—the only part of the Temple where non-Jews could enter. As Professor Barclay puts it, "they had made the one place where everyone could pray into a noisy marketplace where no-one could pray. Their shady business was not only hurting the Jews financially, it was hurting the pious Gentiles spiritually."

God cares about what we do. His rules aren't meant to snare us or to make life difficult; they are meant to stop us from harming others and from harming ourselves. They guide us to the good life.

If we can see the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Christ and his Church as promoting our good and the good of others then we'll find them much easier to obey. We need to understand that God wants creation to work, according to his plan. Our deliberate failure to follow that plan has consequences for us here and now, because things go better for us when we live according to the manufacturer's instructions.

At the same time, God's law is more than just a master plan: it's what he expects of us. As I've just said, Jesus does care about what we do. We can anger the Lord by our sinful actions; we can deserve to be kicked out of our Father's House.

Lent is a time to grow in our relationship with God, to take positive steps towards a better, richer and more prayerful Christian life. But for some of us it is also a time to take a hard look at our lives, our business practices, our treatment of others. We should ask whether there is anything we do that exploits others.

If we acknowledge such sins, and turn away from them, the merciful Lord will heal and strengthen us, and give us the joy of a truly blessed Easter.

Quenching our Thirst in the Desert (Lent 1B)

People sometimes think I run the show at Christ the Redeemer. Sometimes I even think so myself. But it's not true—I answer to quite a number of bosses in the parish.

Today's homily is proof of that. I wanted to speak about the first and second readings since this week we had a guest speaker at the young men's group who introduced us to the seventeenth-century Jesuit scholar who analyzed the dimensions of Noah's Ark, based on the number of species known in his time, and decided overcrowding wouldn't have been a problem.

Father Athanasius Kircher took the Genesis text so seriously that he even calculated what the daily schedule for the animals must have been.

But at 6:04 last night I got an e-mail from our youth minister, asking me to preach on the Gospel. He did more than that—he told me what he hoped I would say in the homily, so it would fit in with the theme of tonight's youth Mass.

So much for the ark.

Actually, it's pretty easy to make today's Gospel relevant for young people. They all appear to live in a desert—have you noticed how much water they drink? Sometimes I think modern youth are dehydrated; they never seem to go anywhere without a water bottle.

The more I thought about that, the more I realized we all live in the desert, at least some of the time. The sun beats down on all of us, and most of us know what it's like sometimes to feel dry as dust in our spiritual lives.

Young people can lose their way in the desert without landmarks to guide them. Middle-aged people can be wearied by the noonday heat: there are many places in the Scripture that speak of the dangers of night, but Psalm 91 reminds us that the midday sun can also be destructive and make Christians lose heart.

Some find old age a desert, with the landscape around them slowly becoming barren.

Whatever age we are, there are various ways we find ourselves in the desert. Sometimes we are even led there by the Spirit, as Jesus was. We didn't ask for it; we can't explain it; and we don't want to be in a dry and lonely place. But we meet God there, according to his plan for us.

Sometimes we are dumped in the desert by circumstances. We're suffering from the death of a loved one, illness, unemployment or some other worry. When we look around we can't see a flower or a tree, just a lot of prickly cactus bushes.

Temptations, too, can be a desert. One day we're hiking up the spiritual mountain, enjoying the view, and then all of a sudden life is bleak, and we're dying for something to relieve the monotony.

There's one thing these different desert experiences have in common: they all make us thirsty. Dryness creates desire.

But here's the important thing: there's nothing wrong with being thirsty, as long as you have something to drink. Thirst in itself isn't bad; in fact, when you're thirsty, there's nothing better than a cold glass of water. The feeling is good. The water refreshes us.

Of course we can try to quench our thirst with the wrong things. Some drinks will make us thirstier in the long run. But if we drink from the stream of life—if we drink the living water that Jesus promises—our thirst will have done us good.

So there's nothing necessarily wrong about the desert. Just as thirst reminds us how much we depend on water, so the deserts of temptation and trial remind us how much we depend on grace.

We usually think of temptations negatively, and focus on our failures or on how close we come to falling. But there is a positive way to consider temptations: they can also be seen as a test that, if successfully overcome, strengthens the Christian to put up a better fight for the Lord.

During those 40 days in the desert, Jesus showed us what he was made of; when we overcome temptation, we show ourselves—and Jesus too—the strength of our inner core.

I've talked about a number of the ways we can find ourselves in the desert. But sometimes we decide to spend time in the desert. That's what Lent can be: we leave the "city" of our selfishness and retreat to the "desert" of our hearts. We freely chose to step back from rushing around in what we call the "real world" in order to have time and energy for the things that matter most.

All of this presumes we are ready to drink from Christ. It is said "when we drink from the world, we always thirst again, when we drink from Christ, we never thirst again." In a world full of temporary things, we'll find temporary satisfaction. Jesus alone satisfies the longing of the heart, and satisfies it reliably, consistently, and eternally.

But he doesn't give us his living water in plastic bottles. We must meet him personally where he can be found—and the desert is one sure place to find him.




 

Formed to Declare His Praise (Sunday 7B)

I was holding my breath and holding back the tears all the way through Father Sarmed's homily last Sunday. But what moved me most was the way he compared Jesus reaching out his hand to heal the leper, and our parish opening its arms to welcome a refugee family.

So today I thought I might pick up where Father Sarmed left off, and say a few things about body language—specifically about how we respond to God with our whole person.

It's an important topic, and particularly important to how we celebrate the sacred liturgy.

One of the parishioners who attended Rise Up, CCO's Christmas conference, told me he was very impressed by the way the young people took part in the liturgies. He said it was the first time he couldn't hear himself think at Mass. At Christ the Redeemer, he explained, the congregation is never louder than his thoughts.

I'd been meaning to talk about the way we participate at Mass in our parish, but that comment told me there was no time to lose.

There are, of course, some really good things happening. People seem to be getting quite comfortable with the new translation of mass, and I notice that the gesture of reverence at communion has become quite common and appears to be meaningful to a majority of parishioners. And we are following carefully the new rules for standing sitting and kneeling.

We have a number of strong Korean families in our parish. A few weeks ago I asked two teenagers if they knew why Koreans make such good Catholics. When they didn't know, I suggested they ask their parents. The next week the boys were ready with an answer.

"Because we are so good at bowing?"

Wrong! The correct answer is because the Catholic Church in Korea was deprived of priests for many years, requiring the laity to take on full responsibility for handing on the faith.

But the answer wasn't a bad one. Gestures like bowing and genuflecting express on the outside the spirit of worship that's on the inside. As St. Paul tells us, "at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend" (Phil. 2:10) What's more, our gestures intensify our prayer and express our unity with one another.

These things matter a great deal. In our first reading today, from the prophet Isaiah, God tells us that we are the people he formed for himself so that we might declare his praise. That's why we exist, and it's certainly why we come to Mass—so that we might declare God's praise. And each one of us has a role to play at Mass, whether we're ordained or not ordained. I stand at the altar because of my ministerial priesthood, while you stand before it because of your baptismal priesthood, the common priesthood we all share.

Exercising the priestly office effectively requires knowing what we are doing, and doing it consciously. How would you feel if the priest came up to the altar looking completely distracted, gazed off into space while saying the words of the Mass in a half-hearted way? Well, it's not that different when members of the congregation participate—or don't participate—like that.

Yet "the liturgy is the public worship of the People of God offered to the Father through His Son Jesus Christ in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Our priestly actions"—mine and yours-- "work in tandem to offer the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ to the Father. " So it is necessary that every member of the assembled community carry out his or her respective duties.

In the words of the Second Vatican Council, we are called to "full, conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations." (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 14).

What does this "full, conscious, and active participation" look like? We talked about our body language—sitting , standing, kneeling, bowing, and striking our breasts—when the changes were introduced. Even more important than liturgical postures and gestures, though, is the way we respond at Mass. It's been almost three months since the changes in the translation of the Mass, so it's time to quit ducking the challenge of saying the right response. Dropping your voice in case you get it wrong isn't helping things along; if you're going to get it wrong, at least let us hear you get it wrong! As Martin Luther said, if you're going to sin, sin boldly.

Speaking of Luther's famous line, a musical friend changed it by just one letter to provide us with some more advice. He wrote "sing, but sing boldly."

Singing boldly is not exactly what we're famous for at Christ the Redeemer. St. Paul tells us today that Jesus was not "yes and no", but always "yes." If the apostle heard us sing, he'd probably put us down as "maybe."

Our excellent choirs cover our tracks very well, but when I look out and see only one in four parishioners' lips moving during the hymns, I am discouraged. The choirs are here partly to encourage us to sing, not to sit back.

It's almost too well-known to repeat, but St. Augustine's famous line "to sing is to pray twice" contains a powerful truth. Singing makes us vulnerable, it takes a bit of effort, and it allows us at least to try to join the angelic choirs?

There are a few—a very few—who can't sing at all. But most of us can, and when we don't we are shirking our responsibilities as members of a worshipping community. I plead guilty to getting a very slow start on the new Mass setting, but when I finally get it down, I intend to sing more, rather than less, as a part of the rediscovery of the solemnity of our Catholic liturgical tradition.

Everything we do at Mass connects to the world beyond the doors of the church. To quote Blessed John Paul, "If our Eucharistic worship is authentic, it must make us grow in awareness of the dignity of each person…. The sense of the Eucharistic Mystery leads us to a love for our neighbor, to a love for every human being" (Dominicae Cenae 6).

It wasn't accidental that we heard Father Sarmed's moving words at Mass. It wasn't just a convenient time for him to describe the suffering of his fellow Iraqi Christians and to ask our support for a refugee family. There is a seamless connection between our parish Eucharist and our parish charity, the charity that we will express in our collection for the Shaboo family later in this Mass.

Finally, I'd like to say a word about a particular kind of body language and our Christian faith: it's called fasting. Particularly at Lent, the Church reminds us that we are body and soul, and invites us to connect our bodies to our prayer by the ancient penitential practices of fast and abstinence from meat. These practices are recommended throughout the 40 days of Lent, but only required on two of them: Ash Wednesday, which is this week, and Good Friday.

On both these days, every Catholic 14 years of age or older must abstain from meat, while those 18 to 60 are too fast—which means to have one full meal only, with two small and simple meals at other mealtimes. It is not a difficult discipline, so could well be followed even by those not strictly obliged. I think the law was written when 60 was old—and as I draw nearer to that mark, I know it is not!

Some of the thoughts  here are taken from two homilies from Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Virginia: "Revering Jesus in the Mass," and "Liturgical Gestures, Postures Foster Unity, Express Reverence." They're well worth reading.


 

Two Catholic Schools, Two Visitors, Two Other Blogs!

No homily from me this Sunday!  Father Sarmed Biloues, who ministers to Iraqi Catholics, will be preaching. He will help our parishioners prepare to receive the Iraqi refugee family that we are sponsoring to Canada. They are presently in some peril even in their refugee camp, since they are in Syria, so we pray they will arrive here soon.

We also have a visiting permanent deacon and his wife, Deacon Roy and Liz Harrington. The Harringtons came up from Seattle to talk with our aspirants and their spouses yesterday, and made a great impression. Deacon Harrington is the director for permanent deacons in the Archdiocese of Seattle. I hope they'll return when there's an opportunity for him to preach.

Instead of my homily this week, I encourage faithful readers to look at two of my favourite blogs. Archbishop Terrence Prendergast has a homily this week about the reasons Jesus sometimes asked for secrecy after he performed a miracle. If you visit his blog, The Journey of a Bishop, you can also see his photos of the skaters on the Rideau Canal.

My other favorite blogger is our youth minster, Jeremy Keong.  He blogs much less faithfully than Archbishop Terry, but when he does post something  it's an event! His current post is a very interesting opinion about people raising their hands when they pray. So check out The Road to Emmaus and let him challenge or inspire you, or both!

To complete this busy Sunday, we have students from our parish school participating as readers and gift-bearers at all Masses; high school students from St. Thomas Aquinas did the same last week, marking our annual Catholic Schools Week. We're proud of our two schools!