Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
How did this all begin? It began with a unique ceremony that is like a Mass without a consecration: There is an introit, an opening prayer, an epistle, a tract, a gospel, which is the Gospel of the Palms, a preface, a Sanctus, and then the blessing of the palms with five prayers, each of which refer to the procession that follows and which are among the most glorious prayers in the Missal, and finally the procession itself. The purpose of the procession is not to re-enact Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem, the end of which would be his Passion and Death. The antiphons that were just sung in the procession today are hymns of praise to Jesus the Redeemer King. It is a triumphal procession that leads back to the entrance to the church. But then, on the way back to the church, climbing up the steps, there is a pause, for the front door of the church is closed shut. And then comes that strange but wonderful back and forth singing of the choir inside and the priest and people outside. Then the deacon takes the processional cross and bangs on the base of the door three times for the doors to open and allow the procession to go into the church.
And we entered the church, and what we saw is the opposite of triumph, the opposite of beauty. For those elements of the church that are central to its beauty are covered: the statues and painting of the saints, the painting over the high altar of our Lady’s Assumption--the affirmation of what the Resurrection means-- the Crucifix and the statues of Mary and John on the rood beam: all covered, blotted out from our sight, as if to say: it is time to ponder these things in our hearts and to see at the heart of our being what this all means, what our Catholic faith is really about. And there is no Gospel reading. Instead, there is the singing of the Passion according to St. Matthew in a special chant used only for this purpose. We are called in Holy Week to imitate the emptying out of God so that we can see with the eyes of faith.
St. Paul’s words in today’s magnificent epistle so deeply understands where the emptying out of God led to, where Christmas led to, when God emptied himself taking the form of a servant, and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. But that humiliation, which is the triumph of the King of heaven, is most emphasized by the cry from the Cross: “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” Those words, which have the words of authenticity coming from the Psalmist, gave the early Church pause. Those words bothered some Christians so much that in later heretical writings, those words addressed to God were rewritten as “My power, my Power, softening the whole scene, making Jesus’ words merely expressive that his divinity was leaving his body before death.
Those words may bother us as well, those of us who see the Cross as merely something Jesus had to go through to get to Easter. But this cry certainly expresses the meaning of the Cross more profoundly than anything else in the Passion narrative. Matthew seems to use Old Testament citations to relieve, in a sense, the events of the Passion of their truly scandalous character. These things happened according to prophecy. But the cry from the Cross actually enhances the scandal. For on the Cross, in St. Paul’s words, “he who knew no sin God made to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
We prefer to look at the pure Lamb of God hanging on the Cross as put there by men and women, full of sin, and they did this to him who in no way deserved this. And that is true, but it goes much deeper than that. What Jesus did in his life was to seek out sinners, to eat with them, to talk with them, to put himself on the side of sinners--not however on the side of sin--but on the side of the sinners, and he did this in order that he might save them. It is on the Cross that this saving action reaches its highest and lowest point.
The cry from the Cross is a cry of dereliction, a cry that comes from the heart that is aware of being alone, apart from God. The cry comes from the pure Lamb of God who has been made sin, that is, who knows that deep estrangement from God, that alienation that is the human condition. That cry comes from that deep sense of God’s absence, not only because of the finitude of mortal life, but because of that willful rebellion against God that shuts out God and deepens that alienation.
When we look at Jesus dying on the Cross, when we see him dead on that Cross, we are looking not only at a biological death, the death of the man, Jesus. Nor is it a matter merely of a good man dying for the sake of others. That is not salvation.
Rather it is Jesus--not against God but for God--who takes on and endues the most bitter consequences of sin, which is alienation from God, cut off from the source of life. But if Jesus had not identified himself so completely with sin and death, then his death would not have been that triumph over sin and death that it was and is. That is why the Cross is a triumph, a trophy, because of the complete abasement, the complete self-emptying out of God. This is Jesus’ obedience to the will of his Father. Because of this, says St. Paul, “God highly exalted him”. It is precisely there in the darkness of that day, in the earthquake that shook the earth, that the Son of God who is God suffered the death that is alienation from God because of sin: there is seen the triumph of God’s saving plan for a people yet unborn.
We enter into Holy Week today. We will still go to work, we will see the kids off to school, we will still take care of the many obligations we have. But this week must be different in some deep way. For we must meditate in a deep and constant way on this action that brought about our salvation. The Crosses in our churches will continue to be veiled, even on Holy Thursday when the veiling is white as we commemorate the Last Supper that is at the heart of the Mass and the institution of the Sacred Priesthood. But on Good Friday-- the day on which mere words fail when confronted with the death of God in the flesh for you and for me that we may be saved from eternal death-- the Cross is unveiled, and it is unveiled so that we may kiss the Cross in an act of profound adoration. And it is that act of adoration of the Cross on Good Friday that enables us to experience the joy of Easter, a joy that fills us with that sure hope for eternal life in God.
