Good Friday - What have I done to you?
Note: This will be disjointed. I apologize, but hopefully you are able to glean something from my thoughts, scattered and poorly connected though they be here.
Each year I come to a new parish, I look forward to Good Friday to see if they sing the Reproaches as part of the Triduum's observance of Our Lord's Passion, and if so, what setting they sing. As an fyi, "The Reproaches" refers to a series of antiphons that express God's...well, reproaching God's people. "O my people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me!" is the refrain. As we reflect on the tremendous agony and affliction our Savior suffered, and that it was done for our sake, it is a harrowing and shaking remonstration.
Years ago, a choir in which I sang offered an arrangement by Damian Lundy, FSC. It is a simple arrangement that does not have the powerful thunder or celestial otherworldliness of the arrangements you might commonly encounter in a basilica. It does not offer an imposing voice from heaven; rather, its approachable melody speaks more of what I might imagine Christ crucified might ask from the cross. While the exact lyrics are under copyright, it basically lists the wonders the Lord has worked in salvation history...and our response to all of that is Christ's scourging, suffering, and crucifixion.
I have yet to hear it again. I hold the tune and lyrics in memory, relishing how their mournful reprimands pierce me and shake me to my core. It sounds an odd thing to say, but allow me a moment.
No celebration of the Resurrection is what I would call full-bodied without intentional reflection on our individual roles that led to Christ's Passion and Death. If we have been saved from the wages of Sin, i.e., death, it's probably important to know how we have followed Sin's path in our lives if the love of God, the gratuitous nature of the invitation to eternal life, are to hit us more immediately and personally rather than abstractly. It's far easier to shrug off the abstract. It's far more difficult to not be stricken by the personal.
How have I prepared a cross for the Lord? How do I spit in the Lord's face, mock Him, nail him to the cross? If whatever I do to the least is what I do to the Lord, what have I done to the person I love least? Dorothy Day once said, "I only love the Lord as much as the person I love the least." We do this in our concrete actions and in the myriad ways that we tacitly support our communities' failure to strive for (or sometimes outright neglect of) the common good and inalienable dignity of every human from conception to natural death. I am not exaggerating when I say "myriad". I always have the temptation to water this down. After all, that's a lot to bear. It's too much to bear, in fact. My own failings and shortcomings as a person are too much to bear on their own much of the time, let alone those greater sins of the community I with which I cooperate more remotely. It is impossible, save for the grace of God. We are too finite and limited to accomplish this on our own. We need God. Easter spoilers: God gives this grace to us abundantly.
The interchange between the Passion and Resurrection ought to be one we engage with every day. Each day we can reflect on ways in the past and present (both in concrete, one-off actions and in patterns of behavior and systems of sin) that necessitate what Christ has done for us on the cross, which in turn allows us to rejoice all the more intimately in the glory of the Resurrection, which in turn can help us take up our own crosses and deny ourselves as we live more deeply in God's love and share it with others. Some days this may well feel empowering and exhilirating. In other seasons it will feel more like dialysis: arduous, lengthy, painful.
The Triduum liturgy holds up what's at the center of our faith as if under a microscope: going intentionally through every little beat, recalling why we rejoice, why we need to be here, what we are called to do as we go forth. We live the truth of this Triduum every day, celebrate it at every Mass.
Give us the strength to more and more turn our eyes toward your cross, to not hide from that sin in our lives that nailed you there and scourged your back, Lord Jesus. Through the grace of your Resurrection, may our journey with you through your Passion shed ever-greater insight into how deeply we need you, how incomprehensibly much you love each of us, and how powerful your love can be in our lives if we let it. May we hear and hold onto your reproaches, may we know what we have done to you, and by your grace may we not come away from that encounter unmoved.
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