Good Friday Homily

I have to say, this is a strange experience for me. As I’m sure it is for you tuning in. Normally we have a packed church; we come from the united walk of witness from Methodist Central Hall to Westminster Abbey to Westminster Cathedral; then later on we have Veneration of the True Cross at a beautiful service based on Jesus’ Seven Last Words put together by our young adults. I enjoy Good Friday. The whole Farm Street Community in its great diversity, the Christian community in our city, all come together. Solidarity. Communion. Around the cross. This year is different. We embrace the emptiness, the distance, the isolation and loneliness, and we move into Holy Saturday as we wait at the tomb, a people, physically at least, apart. I for one am reminded how grateful I should be for the physical communion of celebrating Easter as I sincerely hope this is the last time we celebrate Easter like this. In my lifetime.

But am I missing something? Is the now not just a tunnel we need to endure as we know we will go back to normality as we surely will? Am I to write off Easter 2020 as a blot on life’s landscape, making sure I survive it and going through the motions with stiff upper lip so I get through the other side and back to happier, normal, familiar times? Is that what Good Friday is about? Or is it an opportunity? Is it a gift? What is God saying to us in the suffering, the loss, the grief, the emptiness, the abyss?

A friend of mine plagued with recurring mental health issues said to me recently: the cross is “what really makes sense of my life”. If you’ve accompanied a dying person you may have experienced their need to hold onto a holding cross as it’s called. Because there is, I think, in the cross, something of the moment in my, in our history suspended in time which can alone make sense of all time. It is the moment of crisis, the moment of decision, the moment of accepting who I am and how I am being led by something greater than myself in the grand plan. In the Cross is the moment when we realise all our plans are provisional, that whoever we are from political leader to the young and fit to the homeless beggar to the addict to the prince, that we are all equal because we are all human. We all suffer. We all die. And in that moment of clarity in the middle of the tunnel of despair we are asked what we did with that gift of human life on this planet we take for granted so much.

In a few minutes after prayers for the whole world the small Jesuit Community here will make an outward display of our common humanity by venerating the cross and we invite you to do the same with a cross or crucifix you have at home. As you do bring yourself as you are to him and ask for the strength to commit yourself to being a good human being. This Easter there is no opportunity for confession – don’t worry about that – but I invite you to use this moment to look at Jesus on the cross and see how he looks at you in the here and now, he who has died for us, and ask myself what will I do for him? How will I learn from this moment in our history when we are suffering, when we are grieving and we are also seeing extraordinary service, remarkable selflessness, when, if we commit ourselves to conversion of heart, if we treat the now as a school for the future in the light of the cross, a new humanity can emerge, a new commitment to faith and justice, to love and hope, when in the light of day new life appears and speaks the truth through what we have been learning to become.

For each one of us we will have our personal story when we speak to Jesus, our own sorrows and our own personal hopes for new life, and they will be crystalised by how we are living this time. In isolation, in too close proximity perhaps in families and relationships which we learn are to be cherished more or which break down, in the emotional and physical exhaustion of those who keep it all going in daily fear for their lives in the hospitals, schools, cleaning the streets, providing transport, all those volunteering, and we could go on. What is this moment of the cross saying to me?

And yet this global pandemic like the cross telescopes out from that first Good Friday to a call to conversion which is on a grand scale. Pope Francis has this to say about what we can learn from this current crisis: “This crisis is affecting us all, rich and poor alike, and putting a spotlight on hypocrisy. I am worried by the hypocrisy of certain political personalities who speak of facing up to the crisis, of the problem of hunger in the world, but who in the meantime manufacture weapons. This is a time to be converted from this kind of functional hypocrisy. It’s a time for integrity. Either we are coherent with our beliefs or we lose everything”. For the Holy Father this then is a time for reassessing our global responsibility as the human race and to committing ourselves to conversion – in concrete ways. One key way is his call to put a stop to all conflicts and wars around the world as these are exacerbating the impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable. This moment of crisis, this moment of the Cross, has brought us to realise this is necessary if we are to be truly responsible as the human race fundamentally interconnected.

And the Holy Father sees our interconnection as necessarily involving the planet itself. This crisis again, this moment of the Cross, urges us to take action if we are to be fully responsible human beings: “Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger. Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption (Laudato Si’, 191) and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. We need to reconnect with our real surroundings. This is the opportunity for conversion. Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human. But let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were. This is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it.”.

So what will we learn from the Cross? What do we want to say to Jesus about my own cross and the crosses of the world we all inhabit? As he has done so much for me, for us, what will I, we do for him? Will this time of crisis become simply a memory or will that memory be as is the Eucharist a living memory which calls me to constant conversion? To make the world more human. May this moment speak to us the truth and so lead us to hope and new life.

Fr Dominic Robinson SJ