The English-speaking world calls today Good Friday. In Slavic countries, it is the Great Friday. For the Hispanophones or Francophones, it is Holy Friday. Rightly so because at the heart of “Good” Friday is saintly and salvific suffering. Mandarin is true to what “Good” Friday is. It is literally named as “Jesus receives suffering” day.
Like the famous Simon & Garfunkel hit “Sound of Silence”, we have come to “talk to saintly silent suffering”.
We learn from science that nature abhors a vacuum. The nature of our challenge is not the abhorrence of vacuum but rather an addiction to its opposite. Our noisy world is unable to stay with silence. Do not even mention endure suffering since we have found it increasingly impossible to stay still. What we have done is to successfully drown every possible waking moment with electronic and entertainment noises because we are afraid of our own thoughts. Have you ever laid in bed, unable to sleep and scrolling through YouTube mindlessly and often tempted to go to sites which are more titillating? I have. We are afraid of what we might find in ourselves. Or we are afraid of hearing the Lord speak to us. As social creatures, we seek to interact and we crave connexion. We trawl the net, we scroll the tube, we “book our face” or “Face our Book” (internet, YouTube, Facebook). Thus, we run away from being with or facing ourselves or worst, run away from facing the Lord and in running away, we also want to escape from suffering.
Why?
As Isaiah poignantly pointed out. “There is nothing beautiful about Him. Nothing to draw us unto Him”. Just look at the Cross—a bruised and bloodied Body.
The only language we can have when facing the broken Body of Christ is silence for without silence we cannot understand suffering. With noises that constantly envelope us, our agitation will not allow us to contemplate and embrace suffering. For us suffering is a pain to be avoided at all costs. Yet on the quiet mountain Elijah heard God’s voice in the gentle breeze. In the silence of Gethsemane, Christ heard the Father’s will. In our silence we can hear Christ’s love for us.
On Good Friday, the only day in the whole year when the Eucharist is not celebrated, we hear God’s first language. His silence. Heaven is silent because speech loses its meaning in the face of the fullness of God. Perhaps it is why we now find heaven to be an impossibility because we have come to desire a heaven that echoes our clamour and our clang, our cacophony and our commotion. The silence of the Cross powerfully reminds us that whatever administrative adjustments we can achieve, whatever pastoral programmes we push, whatever political projects we perform or whatever social solution we can set up to save the world, they will all come to a standstill because we are in the presence of the Only Person who can save the world. Evil can destroy everything including the human Body of Jesus but it cannot destroy His silence. Evil dies before a Christ who suffers in silence to reveal His love for souls.
Before the battered, bruised and bloodied Body of love and salvation, we stand in utter silence so that our emptiness, devoid of din and disquietude, can truly be filled with the saving love of Christ. Right after this, we unveil and venerate the Cross and then we will partake of Holy Communion. As Saint Teresa of Calcutta says, “If you look at the Crucifix, you understand how much Jesus loved you then. When you look at the Host, you understand how much Jesus loves you now”. Come, let us adore our suffering Saviour and Lord, Jesus Christ. He died to lose none but to save all.
