Good Friday - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2018

Jesus’ Agony in the Garden.. Jesus’ garden experience was a different suffering from today’s scourging, crowning with thorns and crucifixion. It was an inner wrestle [that is what agony really means], in some ways more intense than the physical suffering that followed – though John’s Gospel chose to say nothing about it. Perhaps, in our different ways, each of us knows something of what that inner wrestle involved.

Did you hear today’s Second Reading, “It is not as if we had a high priest who was incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us; but we have one who has been tempted in every way that we are [though he is without sin].” The author than went on to add cryptically, “Although he was Son, he learnt to obey through suffering.”

It is against this background that I try to make sense of what is going on in our Church, the Body of Christ, at the moment. Yesterday’s Warrnambool Standard carried news of the coming trial of a former priest of the diocese [again!] for what are called “historical sexual offences”. He has already spent time in gaol for similar offences committed against victims from nearby Penshurst.

Each time we are confronted with news of this type, we suffer. The degree of our suffering, of course, is nothing like that of the victims themselves or their families and close friends, but it is real. It hurts. It saddens us yet again. We feel angry, and anywhere from bewildered, confused, helpless, indignant, betrayed. Suffering like this becomes temptation. How do we respond? Some of us move into denial and try to get on with life. Some of us have walked away. Some of us feel the pain, but choose to stay, perhaps content to do nothing, perhaps trying to find ways to respond constructively.

Did Christ feel pain like this? Did he know temptations to helplessness, bitterness, confusion, anger, despair? The scriptural author said “he was tempted in every way that we are”. Would some of his agony have been fuelled by his struggling to face and to overcome similar inner pressures?

Fascinatingly, the author also added the bit about, “he leant to obey through suffering”. What might that mean? We are not told. It is important to realize that “obey” in this context means something like “tune in to the heart of the other”, “share what the other feels” – the “other” in this case being God his Father. I think that Jesus learnt that to hang in and not lose hope, not choose not to love this sin-twisted world, was essentially what his Father was about. So, though he struggled to do so, and it cost him dearly, he chose to continue to hope and to love, and even to surrender his life for us very imperfect human beings.

You are all here this afternoon. You have hung in. We do not judge those who have chosen otherwise. We do not know the depth of their pain. But by doing so, despite the struggle, we begin to experience even now the truth of the author’s observation, “Jesus became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation”. May we continue to experience it ever more deeply.