This Good Friday Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion begins with silence and our own personal prayers. On this most solemn of days, each of us speaks our heart to God in those moments of silence. We bring our own selves, our own lives here and we place our selves and our lives at the foot of the Cross of Jesus. In the prayer that collects all our personal prayers together, we spoke to God the Father, telling God that we believe that God has abolished death; death which is every human being’s inheritance from our first parents. God accomplishes this by the suffering and death of Jesus, God’s Son.

Death is the ultimate result of sin. In the history of God’s people, the Israelites, the High Priest needed to offer sacrifices so that sins would be forgiven. Those sacrifices had to be repeated over and over and over because they did not have the power to end the reign of sin which was rooted in people’s lives.

The early Christians understood that Jesus was the great high priest who offered his one sacrifice on the Cross.  And by that one sacrifice, Jesus overcame sin and death. There is a prayer in the Church’s liturgy that says:“Jesus Christ loved us, and poured out his own blood for us to wash away our sins.”

His one sacrifice on the Cross achieved what all the sacrifices that went before it were unable to achieve: the forgiveness of the sins of each of us and the destruction of the power of death over each of us. As Jesus offered his life on the cross he took upon himself all the sinfulness, all the evil and corruption of our lives and, by giving up his life to his Father, he made available to us the forgiveness of all our sins. He made of us a people whose future is eternal life.

The Prophet Isaiah, in the First Reading today, spoke of a mysterious figure whom he called the Servant of God. This servant would bear the iniquities of everyone. He took upon himself the ugliness of our human condition. Isaiah said that he astonished people, so marred was his appearance that he hardly looked like a human being. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by people, a man of suffering and infirmity.  

The Servant of God became a living image of what evil does to our lives. Evil is what destroys and contaminates our lives. Evil fills our lives with ugliness and suffering. I can’t help but think of the events of these last couple of days here in our own city. A boy goes on a rampage with a knife, stabbing people in a public mall. A similar incident in Calgary with much worse consequences, the death of several young people who had the promise of their whole lives before them.

What pain, what suffering, what darkness and confusion has laid hold of the lives of the people whose family members were killed in such a bazaar way? But we must also wonder what could so twist a boy’s life so that at the age of 15 he would try to kill? What ugliness, what suffering, what disorder has so taken hold of his young life that it threatens to destroy him. This is one picture of evil among many in our world. This is the evil that Jesus took upon himself and willingly submitted to death himself so that we could find mercy, forgiveness and life for us.

The Passion according to Saint John is read every Good Friday. In this telling of the Passion, Jesus is not a powerless victim. He decides what will happen. In obedience to His Father’s will, he willingly lays down his life and he does so for us. As the Letter to the Philippians says:“Christ became obedient for us to death, even death on a Cross. Therefore God exalted him and gave him the name above every name.”

By his death on the cross,” Jesus not only shows us the mercy of God for us, Jesus makes clear that he is the mercy of God. Jesus is the forgiveness we seek as he is the way, the truth and the life for us.

Mercy for us is not an action; mercy is a person. Forgiveness is not an action, forgiveness is a person: the person who confronted evil and took upon himself our sins and who died so that we would be made free and live forever.

Shortly, we will venerate the cross to show our deep gratitude for what God has done for us in Jesus. When you approach the cross and kneel to venerate it, place all that weighs you down in your life on that cross as you touch it. Put on the cross all your fears and worries, all your sinfulness and weakness and failings, remembering that, on the cross,“Jesus Christ loved us, and poured out his own blood for us to wash away our sins.”

And then we will receive Holy Communion. Since Jesus is God’s mercy, since Jesus is God’s forgiveness, we enter into communion with him, we make ourselves one with him through the Sacrament of his Body and Blood in Holy Communion and so we find our salvation.

We believe what was written in the Letter to the Hebrews: “Although (Jesus) was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”