“It is finished”. Jesus hangs on the cross. He gives his spirit up to God. Now it is Friday. Christ is dead. We are left, like the women at the foot of the cross, to mourn. Good Friday is a day to mourn, a day to remember, a day to weep. A day when those who love Jesus turn to one another, like Mary and the disiple Jesus loved and pledge to take care of one another.
Good Friday is a day to recall that while Christ is with us always he is also absent. That while we remember him faithfully we are also like those first followers were on that first Friday.
How many of us expect to see the risen and ascended Christ walk our streets? How many of us expect to hear and see him in life? For how many of us is the return in glory a real and vivid expectation?
We adapt to the life we know, as the disciples thought they would have to do. We accept that the world is full of sickness, pain and death. We learn to live with injustice, starvation and war.
This world is not the new creation we are promised, any more than Jesus hanging broken on the cross is the messiah his followers were looking for.
Like them we look at a broken and bleeding world and we look to one another to make it bearable. We come into the Church as Mary went into the disciple’s house, looking for sanctuary and comfort.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Jesus himself commanded it from the cross.
It isn’t enough, though. He had promised them that he would return to them, and he did. He has promised us that he will return to us, and he will. This is Friday and we should mourn but even on Friday, even through the long Good Friday that is our lives without the physical presence of our saviour and without the recreation of all things, we have to remember and believe the promise of Easter, the promise that all, in the end, will be well.
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