Good Friday Devotion

Good Friday Meditation – April 11, 2009

John 19:25b-27

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdelene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

Meditation: For me, the one redeeming moment of Mel Gibson’s overly brutal and bloody, The Passion of the Christ, came in the Pietà moment in the film. It was that moment two hours later than the scene we just heard about in the reading from John about the exchange between Jesus, his mother and the beloved disciple – “Woman, here is your son.” “Disciple, here is your mother.” Michelangelo has so beautifully captured that love between mother and son in his Pietà, where Mary cradles the dead body of Jesus as he is lowered from the cross. The good Catholic, Gibson, didn’t dare miss the opportunity of replicating the moment in his film. And to be honest, I was glad of it. I appreciated the tenderness and poignant grief that was left bare. It ennobled the human drama in the crucifixion, not only with regard to Mary, but most especially in the mother-child relationship with regard to Jesus.

I see such moments when I am with Bonnie as she says goodbye to our children on their visits home. Her motherly love overwhelms her (and usually affects me so deeply, I get emotional as well). While I keep hoping for the day when we can not embarrass ourselves in saying our goodbyes, yet at the same time, I find it deeply moving to know how much this mother loves her children. When I see Jesus on the cross reaching out in similar appreciation to his mother (and to one who he selects as her caregiver), I can’t help but playing over scenes at airports and driveways that I have witnessed up close and personal. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is always putting things on a spiritual plane. Yet, as this moment also says: the spiritual is not divorced from everyday life. Quite the opposite is true. When the Word of God takes on human form, God moves into the neighborhood. The realm of the spirit is among us and evident most compellingly in the love we are to share with one another.

The French mystic Simone Weil makes a most helpful observation about love. She speaks of it as having two qualities: distinctiveness and the bond. We recognize these two qualities at perhaps contrary moments. Sometimes it is the moment when we are apart from the one we love (from our friend) that we best understand the strength of the bonds we may feel with one another. Turned around, it is in the moment when we are with our beloved, with our great friend, that we often revel in the uniqueness of the other. The dignity of Jesus’ mother and the trust given to the beloved disciple in this second last word of Jesus speak to us of where the Spirit of God is in our own midst. It is in the bonds we feel when, in our human experience, that separation cannot take away from us. It is in the uniqueness and worthiness of each person with whom we are present.

Let us take a moment to extend the peace of Christ to one another, remembering that Jesus cared about our relationships with one another in the way he commended his mother and his follower to one another as one of his chief duties on the cross.