Friday, April 3, 2026
Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12
Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9
John 18:1 - 19:42

Is Jesus dead or alive? If he is dead, the gospel tells us something about his life. If he is alive, Jesus speaks to us today through the gospel. He speaks to us as clearly as he spoke to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, calling her by name, sending her forth to partner with him in a new way to proclaim the Good News to all.

Is Jesus dead or alive? If Jesus is alive, what is he saying to you and me through this Gospel as we follow Jesus today?

In John’s passion narrative, we see Jesus opposed by religious leaders and the political forces of Imperial Rome, who squelch his mission to establish God’s reign of love, justice and peace. With his arrest and public execution, he is crushed in agonizing defeat. The victorious cries of “Hosanna in the Highest,” quickly became “Crucify him! Jesus hangs naked on the cross, crucified between two criminals. As our first reading states, “so marred was his appearance…. despised and rejected by others.” The betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, and the flight of his disciples intensifies his unbearable suffering.

Jesus on the cross, reveals the excruciating reality of human suffering that none of us can escape. Too many are crucified today: those suffering violence and discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, those suffering domestic abuse, those on death row, those suffering war and poverty, forced to migrate from their homes, those in the throes of injury, illness, and death. The Earth, too, is crucified by global environmental devastation. Jesus on the cross shows us a God who joins us in our suffering, a God who welcomes us with outstretched arms, a God who renews our perseverance to make God’s cause our cause for the redemption of Earth community.

Jesus on the cross, crying out “I thirst,” reveals a God, thirsting for our wholeness, thirsting for friendship with us in intimate union. Jesus reveals a God who patiently listens to us, receiving the sour wine of our grief, anger, shame, and self-deprecation. God thirsts for our healing and our renewed commitment to make the world a home where all are welcome as Emmanuel: God with us, God in us.

Unlike the synoptic gospels, where the women following Jesus stand far off in the distance, barely visible, John’s gospel, places the women front and center at the foot of Jesus’ cross. The three Marys, with the beloved disciple, courageously stand by Jesus. Jesus looks tenderly upon his mother Mary as she embraces his suffering, her heart ripped open in grief. Can we even imagine the searing soul exchange that passed between them? You may recall, that according to John’s gospel, Mary initiated Jesus’ public ministry at the wedding in Cana when she said to him, “they have no wine,” and then to the attendants, “do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2: 3-5). Now she stands by him in his final hour when he consummates his mission by freely laying down his life for us all. Out of abiding love for his mother, Jesus entrusts her care to his beloved disciple.

As I reflected on Jesus, gazing lovingly at his mother, I recalled Mary’s annunciation story when she encountered the Angel. She was only a teenager, living in Palestine under the perilous military occupation of Rome. She responded to the Angel’s invitation with a bold yes to God, yes to a call she could not possibly comprehend, yes to the risk of being publicly exposed to the religious sanction against unwed mothers, yes to a vision of a mission for herself and her little boy that would scatter the proud and gather the humble, bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly, that would fill the hungry with good things and send the billionaires away empty (Lk 1:51-53), her yes to a life that jeopardized her safety and the safety of her son.¹

Jesus’ total yes to God held high on the cross echoes Mary’s yes. Jesus’ gift of self in love of God and neighbor honors Mary’s self-gift to God. As Rachael Held Evans writes, “Before Jesus fed us with the bread and wine, his body and blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: ‘This is my body, given for you.’ Jesus and Mary call us to do likewise.

After Jesus states, “It is finished,” and breaths his last, John’s gospel is the only gospel to recount that the soldier pierced Jesus’ side with a spear. Then in the presence of his mother and the small community gathered at the foot of his cross, Jesus gives birth to something new as blood and water flow from his pierced side. From the side of Christ, the Church is born with the proclamation that all people pass with Christ from death to new life. Now 2000 years later, we the Christian community stand at the foot of the cross in dark times when evil once again is having its hour. Our challenge, in the words of Ilia Delio, is to “Stay the course of love in a world that resists love, fears love, and rejects the cost of love.” Jesus on the cross proclaims that love does not end in death. Rather, love never fails!

Today, in our Good Friday liturgy, we will venerate the cross of Christ. We venerate the Cross to honor God’s saving commitment to our earth community. When we venerate the cross, we are called to commit ourselves to self-giving love. As followers of the Crucified and Risen Christ, we are lifted up on our own crosses daily. Father James Wallace says it this way, “To venerate the cross is to sign ourselves as a people who are committed to the dying and rising with Jesus alive today for the life of the world.”

 

---

¹ "Mary's Wholehearted Call" by Rachael Held Evans