Good Friday and Compassion

In the current issue of The Yale ISM Review, there’s a powerful Good Friday homily by Teresa Berger. She draws our attention to the very profound calling to “be there” to the sufferings of our own time, especially those which we cannot resolve or take away.

Why, then, have people for close to two thousand years gathered around the story of Jesus’s Passion and death? And why do we continue to ask each other, in the words of the song we will soon sing: “Were you there?” “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” The answer for all of us after all is: No. We were not there, two thousand years ago. Yet the liturgy of Good Friday labors, as no other liturgy in the year, to render present Jesus’s dying in our midst, to make it coterminous with our own lives. I suggest to you that in doing so, this liturgy is seeking to embody a particular truth: Good Friday is about being there, about being present, about com-passion, and suffering with. As it was on that Friday so long ago, so it is also today.

“Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!” can be read here in its entirety.

A blessed Good Friday to all.

Rita Ferrone

Rita Ferrone is an award-winning writer and frequent speaker on issues of liturgy and church renewal in the Roman Catholic tradition. She is currently a contributing writer and columnist for Commonweal magazine and an independent scholar. The author of several books about liturgy, she is most widely known for her commentary on Sacrosanctum Concilium (Liturgy: Sacrosanctum Concilium, Paulist Press). Her most recent book, Pastoral Guide to Pope Francis's Desiderio Desideravi, was published by Liturgical Press.

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2 responses to “Good Friday and Compassion”

  1. Bryan Walsh

    “…it is not us and our doing that give meaning to Christ’s death. God has already done that, when God faced down dying and death on Good Friday and on Easter morning spoke a powerful “no” to the finality of the death of Jesus. That act, that doing of God—rather than our own—is the ultimate word on the meaning of Good Friday.”

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  2. Jordan Zarembo

    Quite frequently, preachers on Good Friday omit entirely the eternal reality that the sacrifice of Calvary and Mass is one and the same sin-offering, an act of propitiation. What is the mystery of the Cross, or the need for a Cross, if we are not in need to be freed from perpetual death in sin? Compassion and forgiveness are not ipso facto concepts of Good Friday, but consequences of the all-atoning sacrifice of the Son to the Father.

    Why are we Catholics, clergy and laity both, most afraid to speak of sin on Good Friday? Rather, we should speak loudly and often of sin at the same time we rejoice in God’s forgiveness. Because of Good Friday, our sin is not a lasting exclusion from God’s grace. Rather, we are forgiven so that we can grow in grace. Many clergy, I suspect, would rather talk their way around sin on Good Friday unless the collection plate dwindles.

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