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The Catholic Church in
Llandudno Our Lady Star of the Sea Parish Priest: Fr Antony Jones |
A MEDITATION FOR GOOD FRIDAY
The fact that I
spent one the most enjoyable
holidays of my life in a little village near to
I watched a
television bulletin where a woman sat
weeping on the sidewalk, with smashed up buildings all about her. She had lost some members of her family and
was inconsolable. It caused my mind to
flash back to the story told by St Luke of the day Jesus entered the
little
Let’s just imagine
that he did. That Jesus unexpectedly
appears, restores the
lost son to life and returns him to his mother.
Her sorrow would be turned into instant joy.
But the grit would still be in her clothes
and the dust in her eyes; her house would still be lying in ruins with
other
members of her family still missing; the future would still be bleak
and the
bitter weather would be striking her just as keenly as before. Her unexpected joy would be tinged with a lot
of pain that would still have to be got through.
But I saw no sign
of Jesus on that television
screen. The beautiful cathedral which I
remember well was in ruins, a gaping hole in its dome and most of its
roof
caved in. The destroyed church would be
a symbol of the destroyed faith in the hearts of many of that community. The familiar question we hear so often here
would certainly have been asked in Italian there: how can there be a
God, if he
allows this sort of thing to happen, to his own people, to their
children and old
people, even to his own house? And if
the fault line that caused the quake had run through the middle of
Llandudno,
some of us would have been asking the same question, for sure.
No, I didn’t see
Jesus there in that television
report. But he was there.
That bereaved and broken-hearted woman
sitting on the kerb—he was there with her, within her.
He was inside her pain, inside her despair:
He Himself was the hole in her heart.
And how can I say
this? Because we saw it happen on Friday. We celebrated that closeness of Christ to us
on Friday. We entered the hole in his
heart on Friday.
This is what Good
Friday is about. It affirms, in the most
graphic way
imaginable, that God is with us.
“Emmanuel” is not just a Christmas word, it is a Good Friday
word too. God is with us in our pain;
closer to us than
the pain itself, closer to us even than the heart rending grief of
bereavement,
even though we may be quite unaware of his presence, even though we may
think
he has abandoned us or even that he does not exist anymore.
Only a short space
of time separates Friday from
Sunday. Only a short space of time.
Only a short space
of time before that woman on the
pavement will embrace again the son for whom she now mourns. Only a short space of time.
And when that time comes, Christ will restore
us, when the world that we have known and loved, and maybe loved too
much, lies
in ruins about us. His deep-down
presence within us will raise us up with Himself and reunite us again with those whom we have loved “long
since and lost awhile”, when those “angel faces” will smile on us once
more.
That will be no
reunion in the midst of pain and
brokenness, no restoration of son to mother in the midst of pain and
grief and
anxiety, with death casting its inevitable shadow. .
No. The story told
on Friday was just the preface,
just the first few pages. The final
chapter, entitled “Sunday”, will wrap it all up, gather all the strands
together, make sense of the dust in the mouth and the grit in the eyes
and the
hole in the heart and the broken things that had seemed so important
once.
Love is a
word that lies at
the heart of Christianity. It describes
our very destiny and meaning as human beings.
We are meant, created, to love one another and to love God with
an
eternal love, where death does not threaten. Only
in Christ, the Risen Christ, the Easter
Sunday Christ, can this be achieved. His
terrible and horrible wounds are so transformed that the Easter liturgy
can
describe them as “holy and glorious”.
And so with us. The pains of life
and the wounds of death are healed by the Risen Christ as he restores
to the
broken-hearted mother her son alive again, alive again in the glory of
Christ’s
Resurrection where there is no more
sorrow or death, only an eternal love, which knows it can never be
ruined again. Friday and Sunday—they go
together and make
sense of our lives
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