Good Friday

“They will look upon him whom they have pierced” – The entire Gospel of John is, at bottom, nothing other than the consummation of these words, nothing other than an effort to draw our eyes and our hearts to gaze upon him.  Likewise, the entire liturgy of the Church is nothing other than the act of looking upon the One who is pierced, whose veiled face the priest unveils before the eyes of the Church and the world at the climax of the liturgical year, in the solemn celebration of Good Friday antiphon: “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the world.”

“They will look upon him whom they have pierced.” [...] While the paschal lambs are bled in the temple, outside the city a man is dying; the One dying is the Son of God, killed by the same people who believe they are glorifying him in the temple. God dies as a man – he gives himself entirely to mankind, who are unable to give themselves to him, putting the reality of his all-sufficing love in the place of the cultic substitute, which is ultimately of no avail. The Letter to the Hebrews further developed this brief allusion from the Gospel of John, interpreting the Jewish liturgy for the Day of Atonement as a figurative prelude to Jesus Christ’s true liturgy of life and death. What appeared to the eyes of the world as a thoroughly profane event, the execution of a man who had been condemned as a political criminal, was in fact the only real-life liturgy in the history of the world – the cosmic liturgy, which took place not within the circumscribed realm of the liturgical drama, in the temple, but before the whole world. Jesus stepped through the curtain of death and entered the true temple, going before the face of the Father, and what he brought were not substitutions, but himself – as is befitting of true love, which can give no less than its very self. The reality of the love that gives itself has taken the place in the drama that belonged to the substitute, an event that is now acted out for all time. The temple veil is torn asunder, and henceforth there is no cult other than participation in the love of Jesus Christ, which is the everlasting cosmic Day of Atonement.