Good Friday 2025
I’ve frequently thought that the best approach to a homily for Good Friday would be to stand and look at the biggest cross or crucifix and focus on the pain and torment Jesus underwent two thousand years ago. I’ll encourage you to do that sometime in the next couple of days before the Paschal celebration.
Why did Jesus have to die? The simple reason is that the Father willed it. In the creation of humans, male and female, God gave simple operating instructions. They had a perfect garden but needed to tend it, be stewards over it. And they were to unite in matrimonial joy and, in union with the divine intent, bear and educate lots of children. There was one caveat, given as a prohibition against “eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” But they were tempted to do that as a short-cut to divine status, and they did it. Since the pre-announced penalty for disobeying the loving God was ultimate death, all humans would then have to die.
But God’s plan all along was to raise humans to divine status, so He introduced a plan “B.” The Son of God would assume our human nature and become the only God-man. He would assemble a community to spread His message of loving and giving to others. Because of man’s sin He would give up His life for us, and give us mysteries, sacraments, by which we would become incorporated into His own mystical Body. That’s why Jesus had to die. He wasn’t paying some ransom to Satan. He wasn’t placating an angry God. He was taking on our nature so He could die in our stead. When we are baptized, St. Paul says, we are baptized into His death.
Jesus died the painful death of crucifixion for a reason, too. Romans were masters of the Mediterranean world; they achieved that status by shedding oceans of human blood. They picked up the method of crucifixion from a middle Eastern culture and honed it to inflict perfect pain. It was the method used to crucify rebel slaves. The Spartacus slave uprising a hundred years earlier ended with the crucifixion of six-thousand rebel slaves outside Rome. So when St. Paul wrote to the Philippians a couple of decades after Christ’s execution and Resurrection, telling them that God’s Son went as low as He could go in redeeming us from sin and death, his key description was “dying on a cross.”
Today we must give thanks for the gift of Jesus. His self-giving knew no limits and doesn’t stop giving even now. Tomorrow thousands of people all over the world will be joined to Christ’s Body, His Church, in baptism. They will be baptized into the death of Jesus. The challenge to them, and even more to us who are already in Christ, is to take up our crosses daily and follow Christ all the way to Calvary. Only you know what that cross is, but you also must make real the notion that you are following in the steps of Jesus and are bolstered on every step by His love and grace.
