Good Friday: How This Connects to Our Modern World

We have just come from church for Good Friday. Very touching indeed this mass. The Gospel reading was The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. John, which details Jesus’s condemnation by the crowd, his crucifixion and death, then being taken to the tomb. We sang a hymn during Communion with a verse that read:

Thou alone was counted worthy This world’s Ransom to sustain That a shipwrecked race might ever Thus a post of refuge gain, With the sacred blood anointed From the Lamb for sinners slain.

This was sung to the tune of the hymn, “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent,” for those of you who might know that. I found myself tearing up with this verse. Something about “a shipwrecked race” seems so apropos of today’s world. Could we be more shipwrecked when an American brother and sister are standing in line in an airport in Brussels talking to relatives on the phone when a bomb suddenly goes off and they are both killed? Or Syrian refugees, who are physically and emotionally exhausted after fleeing their country out of fear of being murdered, are turned away at the borders of what they thought would be welcoming countries? Or our politicians telling us that we need to patrol Muslim neighborhoods in the U.S., as if our country is not a melting pot of religions and immigrants from all over the world?

This Good Friday for me feels more meaningful than many in the past because our world is in such need of hope, faith and goodness at this very moment. Mourning is in the air with the deaths of so many innocents over the past weeks and months. I can only pray that we will all strive to find the good in each other and the good in ourselves so that we might reach out to one another in love, not in hate. For me, this is the essential Christian message since Jesus’s resurrection is symbolic of love triumphing over hate and injustice.

May light perpetual shine upon all who have died from acts of terrorism in the past days, weeks and months. May their souls rest in peace and may their families find solace for their pain.