Looking at the cross, not just a wooden piece or a silver cross, but beholding Jesus crucified, so many thoughts and feelings can come to us.
Taking part in the celebration of Good Friday, we respond with prayers, songs, and gestures, trying to express something of what we experience.
Pondering over the words used by the prophet Isaiah and those of the gospel text, is somehow… overwhelming:
“Disfigured, despised, rejected, pierced through, crushed, burdened, struck. »
« A man of sorrows,” is the way Isaiah summarizes his description (Is.52:13 – 53:12).
“Betrayed, arrested, denied, abandoned, arrested, put on trial, scourged, crowned with thorns and… crucified,” is the multi-faceted picture the four accounts of the gospel present us with.
He was innocent, the victim of those in power, religious leaders as much as – if not more than – political rulers craving for the prestige and privileges that were theirs and fearing to lose them.
I pause and think of the news bulletin bombarding us with… similar pictures in some way…
The war victims subjected to nerve gas, the starving children, the helpless mothers mourning so many deaths, the men innocent by-standers tortured and beheaded…
The pictures follow one another, shocking, appalling, exposing our helplessness, if not… our indifference.
They, too, are innocent people suffering from an unjust political system whose power is that of selfish tyrants craving for domination.
The question arises: What is the difference?
HE DID IT FOR US…