Good Friday is the one day of the year when Mass may not be celebrated. This day is unlike all others: it is marked by a special atmosphere – the stillness that can fall when we sit by the bed of someone who is seriously ill or dying. That stillness is the presence of mystery.
Churches are stripped down to the bone – statues are veiled, no candles are lighted, the music is plain. The Good Friday afternoon service begins with a long silence. The Gospel is the longest reading of the Church year, the Passion of Jesus according to St. John. Then a solemn procession gradually reveals a plain wooden cross. People come forward to kiss and to venerate it. They leave, again in silence.
Why honor an instrument of obscene torture and humiliation? Where God goes, that place becomes holy ground. The meaning of suffering is transformed by the presence in it of the Crucified God who takes upon himself the deepest levels of human pain. In kneeling to kiss the wood of the cross, we are also acknowledging that sacrifice is part of any love worth the name and committing to try to live that out ourselves.
Orthodox Christians refer to the spirit of Good Friday as “bright sadness” the words recognize that injustice, confusion, savage cruelty, misery, and death are real. They also proclaim that none of these things have the final say over our existence.
Good Friday is not a day for lamenting our own limitations. The astringency of Lent has passed. Nor is it primarily about feeling sorry for Jesus. Rather, it is a time for wondering beyond words, at the God who empties himself out completely out of love. Above all, it is a day for gratitude.
As Jesus dies, his last words are “it is ended.” His mission has been completed. His words also evoke the final brushstrokes and the feeling of satisfaction of a great artist who knows that their masterpiece, which sums up and completes their entire life’s work, is at last finished.
What does this masterwork, this image of a God who comes to share in all of human existence, – its grief and anguish as well as its joys and hopes – tell us? That in the things that really matter no less than love is ever enough, no more than love is needed.