by Fr. Richard Cipolla
We just heard the Passion Gospel sung, and on Good Friday it is always the Passion from the gospel according to John. You notice the text was sung not said, You have all heard of and perhaps some of you have seen the famous Passion Play in Oberammergau in Germany, or perhaps one of the local Passion plays that are part of this time leading to Good Friday and Easter. These are dramatic attempts to depict the events we celebrate in Holy Week from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. But these plays are not liturgical; they have little to do with what we just heard sung as the Passion Gospel.
I remember all too well my first my first experience as a Catholic priest on Good Friday some. 42 years ago now. I read the part of Jesus from a lectern which had a microphone. The narrator did the same from another lectern with a microphone, and the congregation read the crowd parts from something called a missalette, a small booklet printed on cheap paper that had the readings for each Sunday and some of the worst religious music ever written. It was as if we were reading a newspaper account of an event from a long time ago. I remember the congregation sort of mumbling Crucify him crucify him. There were other times when there was an attempt by one of the readers to put some drama into the words, and even the congregation tried to shout crucify him, crucify him, and in so doing destroyed the iconic nature of the Passion Gospel in the Good Friday service.
You say, what do you mean by iconic? Isn’t the purpose of the Passion Gospel to let us know what happened on Good Friday and to show each other by our emotional reaction that we care about what happened on Good Friday? No. What we come here to do today is to liturgically remember--and the English word remember is much too weak to describe this--an event that is the death of God in the flesh on a cross and the effect of that event on you and me. And here words fail us, and that is why what I am saying right now perhaps I should not be saying at all, I should not be talking to you about something that is untalkable about. What we commemorate here today is that act of God that defines what true love is, not love in general, but the love of God for you and me. That God gave his only-begotten son to die a shameful and painful death--painful as no other man has experienced pain that includes the pain of abandonment by his Father--to die this death for you and me so that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
The words of the Passion are sung to an ancient tone that comes out of the mind and heart of the Church. It has no style per se. It cannot be pigeonholed as the product of any one time in the Church. But it developed early in the womb of the Church as part of the liturgical life of the Church. The Latin language certainly played a role in this development, but for those of you who know Latin, Latin is not a beautiful language like Italian or Spanish or French. It is masculine and somewhat harsh. And yet the chant of the Church embraced the language of the Church and what came forth is both beautiful and prayerful and that turns the reading into an icon of sound that penetrates, on this Good Friday, the liturgical icon of the passion and death of the Lord.
It is only in the passion gospel of John that Mary and John stand at the foot of the cross. The rest have fled. But there at the foot of the Cross watching Jesus suffer and die are Mary and John. We read early on in the gospel of John of Jesus’ first miracle: the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast. It is Mary who turns to Jesus and says: they have no wine. Jesus replies: “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” I used to be taken aback in how Jesus addressed his mother as “woman” instead of “mother”--until I sang the role of Jesus in the Passion for the first time many years ago. Before Jesus dies, he says to Mary from the cross: Woman, behold your son” referring to John at the foot of the cross. And to John: “Behold your mother.” Jesus addresses his mother while dying on the cross as “woman.” And in singing that word for woman, in the chant--mulier-- I understood for the first time that her role in salvation was possible because she was a woman and that just as the first woman joined to the first man brought sin and death into the world, it was and still is the woman, the woman who is Mary, who is chosen for all eternity to give birth to the Savior of the world. Do you remember her words when she and Joseph in anxiety thinking he was lost found him in the temple? Mary says: “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” And he said to them, “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” And John says: “They did not understand the saying which he spoke to them.”
But it is now, here at the foot of the Cross, watching her Son in suffering and pain, about to die, she understands. And it is at that moment that the Sacred Heart of Jesu and the Immaculate Heart of Mary are joined for eternity.
Today we sing what is unspeakable. On Easter we will sing what is unimaginable: that the man who died on the Cross, who died for you and me that we might be free from sin and death, rose from the dead, not as a ghost, but as a man, the man Jesus who still bore the wounds in his hands and feet, and it is our faith in Him that gives us, in St Paul’s words, the sure hope of everlasting life. And that also must be sung and not said.
