Homily for Good Friday

"The simple fact is: this can’t be a day like any other. Scripture tells us that on the day Christ died, the world – literally – cracked open. The earth quaked. To this day, we cannot help but remember what was done for us. As the old spiritual tells us, it causes us to tremble.

But in the midst of all this, we do something remarkable.

We venerate the cross with a kiss.

I’m sure some outside our faith find it strange that we pay tribute to an instrument of death. But they don’t see the cross the way we do. Maybe they should.

Maybe they should try to see that the cross was not an end, but a means to an end – the method God chose to remake the world. Maybe they should strive to see in the cross the beginning of our salvation. This is the wood of the cross, on which hung the savior of the world.

When the priest prays the Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation, which we hear so often during Lent, he invokes the cross powerfully, and poignantly. As the prayer puts it, Jesus “stretched out his arms between heaven and earth in the everlasting sign of Your covenant.”

We are reminded today that it is a covenant that was sealed with nails, and splinters, and blood.

In the reading today from Isaiah, the prophet tells us about the suffering servant – foreshadowing Christ. Isaiah tells us: “He grew up like a sapling before him, like a shoot from the parched earth…it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured.”

In Christ’s cross, the wood we venerate and touch, we see part of the shoot from the parched earth. Nailed to this cross, He became one with it – and we are able to see this wood for what it truly is: a tree, like the one that prisoner saw, that holds out hope.

From within the four walls of our brokenness, behind the barbed wires of sin, we look out and look up -- and we see this “tree” that symbolizes our salvation. This is how we know we are saved. This is how we know how much God loves us.

This afternoon, the cross speaks to us. It speaks of the One who suffered and died upon it.

It speaks to us in consolation. And – yes -- in hope.

And quietly, but persistently, it offers us the promise of something better, beyond the prison wall.

'I am here. I am here. I am life. I am Eternal life.'"

This is the ending of the Good Friday Homily by Deacon Greg Kandra. Complete homily here.