St Joseph’s

21 March 2008

We have just heard St John’s account of the final moments of Jesus on the Cross. He entrusts his mother to his beloved disciple and entrusts the disciple to his mother. He says that he is thirsty; then he announces that his work is completed and he gives up his spirit.

This is not just a question of Jesus trying to arrange that his mother would be cared for by John, the beloved disciple. He is telling us about the meaning of our life as the community of his followers. Our life is to be marked by our love for one another. By this will his disciples be known: that they have love for one another. Jesus had spoken of that love at the Last Supper on the previous evening: “Love one another as I have loved you”. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”.

Since then they had seen what that love meant: “We saw him without beauty, without majesty… a thing despised and rejected… he was pierced through for our faults, crushed for our sins… like a lamb that his led to the slaughterhouse…”

The love that unites his mother and the disciple is the love that is meant to unite all of us. It is a love which makes unlimited demands. On Good Friday, Jesus gave everything – he was unjustly condemned, mocked and mistreated, betrayed by one of his friends, denied by another and abandoned by most of the others; he was scourged and crucified. And yet at the end of the horrors of his passion, his final words were words of victory: “It is accomplished”. The love that unites us is the triumphant love that conquers even death. “If he offers his life in atonement… (when) his soul’s anguish (is) over, he will see the light and be content.”

The triumph is his, but it will also be the triumph of all those who follow him: “he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him”.

But he does not leave them, or us, to carry on alone. “Bowing his head, he gave us his spirit.” This was the Spirit who descended on him in the form of a dove at his baptism in the Jordan, when he had been pointed out as the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world. Now, having been led as a lamb to the slaughterhouse, his work was completed and the same Spirit is given to the world.

The apostles will understand the full meaning of that gift on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, the one who makes us children of God and enables us to call God our Father, is the one who unites us to each other.

In the celebration of the Eucharist we offer ourselves and our world to our Almighty Father through Christ, with him and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the love that Jesus pours into our hearts, the love which unites the Father and the Son in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity.

So this day when we remember the suffering of Jesus is nevertheless a day we call Good. It tells us We are a people who are united in our efforts to share with one another the unlimited love that Christ showed us in his life and death. We are a people who believe that the love of Christ has already conquered death and evil. We are a people on whom Jesus has breathed out his Spirit on Calvary and at Pentecost.

This day is good because we know that on this day Jesus, the Son of God went through to the highest heaven and that we must never let go of the faith we have professed.

+Donal Murray