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22 Good Friday Things That Caught My Eye Today: Ukrainian Archbishop, Iraq, & Not Knowing What We Do

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Ukrainian and Russian women carry a cross as they attend the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) procession during Good Friday celebrations at the Colosseum in Rome Italy, April 15, 2022. (Vatican Media/­Handout via Reuters)

1. Archbishop Borys Gudziak: Ukraine’s Holy Week Like No Other

Those who walk through Holy Week in the Ukrainian Catholic tradition read passages from the Book of Job. Job, the righteous one in whom God’s heart delights, of whom He is proud before the angelic court. On Holy Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, we hear about Job’s unspeakable trials: all his possessions are destroyed and all his children are killed. In the end, he is stricken by leprosy, a disease that excludes him from society and leaves him on the margins. Leprosy makes his body decay while still alive. Why does this just and righteous man suffer such terrible evil? Why is Ukraine enduring the terrible evil of war and invasion? Ukraine cries out with Job: why are we experiencing this suffering? What have we done to “deserve” this?

Readers of the Book of Job will not find direct answers to the righteous man’s question. God speaks, revealing His greatness. God fully answers Job’s question only in His Son’s Passion. No one can understand why the innocent suffer. So God offers His solidarity as the answer. God is with us in suffering and death; therefore, we must strive to be with God, to be honest with Him, and to seek Him. Place before Him the millions of displaced adults and children, the young soldiers who fell in battle, the thousands of innocent victims in Mariupol, Bucha, Irpin, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and other cities and villages that were bombed, besieged, and occupied. It is only in communion with God that we can find meaning.

2. Inés San Martín: Holy Week in Iraq a sign that Christians are slowly returning to their homes

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4. European leaders ask Russia to stop destroying religious sites

5. The Seven Last Words of Christ with Fr. Raymond de Souza

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9. Pope Benedict XVI: Not Knowing What We Do and the Cross

The first of Jesus’ words from the Cross, spoken almost at the very moment when the act of crucifixion was being carried out, is a plea for the forgiveness of those who treat him thus: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34) What the Lord had preached in the Sermon on the Mount, he now puts into practice. He knows no hatred. He does not call for revenge. He begs forgiveness for those who nail him to the Cross, and he justifies his plea by adding: “They know not what they do.”

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This combination of expert knowledge and deep ignorance certainly causes us to ponder. It reveals the whole problem of knowledge that remains self-sufficient and so does not arrive at Truth itself, which ought to transform man. In a different way again, we encounter this same combination of knowledge and failure to understand in the story of the wise men from the East. The chief priests and scribes know exactly where the Messiah is to be born. But they do not recognize him. Despite their knowledge, they remain blind. (cf. Mt 2:4-6).

Clearly this mixture of knowledge and ignorance, of material expertise and deep incomprehension, occurs in every period of history. For this reason, what Jesus says about ignorance, and the examples that can be found in the various passages from Scripture, is bound to be unsettling for the supposedly learned today. Are we not blind precisely as people with knowledge? Is it not on account of our knowledge that we are incapable of recognizing Truth itself, which tries to reach us through what we know? Do we not recoil from the pain of that heartrending Truth of which Peter spoke in his Pentecost sermon?

Ignorance diminishes guilt, and it leaves open the path to conversion. But it does not simply excuse, because at the same time it reveals a deadening of the heart that resists the call of Truth. All the more, then, it remains a source of comfort for all times and for all people that both in the case of those who genuinely did not know (his executioners) and in the case of those who did know (the people who condemned him), the Lord makes their ignorance the motive for his plea for forgiveness: he sees it as a door that can open us to conversion.

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12. We can only be with Christ in His Passion if we ask for the Holy Spirit to help us. — From my Ash Wednesday conversation with Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

13. Archbishop Alexander Sample: How Is Good Friday Hopeful?

there’s hope. I have hope. And so should you. Somehow, mysteriously, while truth and love descended into the grave hope did not. Somehow, the great Christian witness to hope remained — like a little child standing beside the grave of her father, waiting for him to wake up, to get up, to hold her — hope stood strong. Because hope trusts. When we remember the crucifixion, we see it through the lens of the glorious resurrection we know is coming. So, we can hope just like the child.

This kind of hope has the power to transform falsehood, hatred, indifference, and apathy into truth and love because hope is transformative. It’s not just about things to come. To have hope within us today, changes who we are today. Here, now. Choosing to trust in the face of what so many others think, believe, and assert — that’s the secret. That’s the power of the gospel.

That God is on the cross is no scandal. It’s the key to unlocking everything: every mystery, every confusion, every doubt. And it depends on simple trust. That trust — that hope — is powerful. It explains why, in another small paradox of Good Friday when we grieve at the loss of Christ on the cross, we cling to the hope that he promises is ours to keep. We cling to the hope that we too will see his resurrection and be taken up in his resurrection.

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15. Father Roger J. Landry:  Be Not Afraid to Share the Triumph of the Victor-Victim

This Good Friday, after seven weeks of witnessing the passion of the people of Ukraine, scrutinizing the atrocities in Bucha and Mariupol, beholding the bloody images of bombed schools, shelters, train stations and apartment complexes, and listening to the traumatic horror stories of those who have suffered the massacre of family members and friends, the destruction of homes, neighborhoods and livelihoods, it is far easier to visualize the maleficence of what happened on Calvary.

It is also easier to recognize Golgotha’s saving relevance.

16. Bishop Robert Barron meditates on the Way of the Cross:

17. Audio Reflection from Discerning Hearts by Msgr. John Esseff

We are closely united to Jesus in his Passion.  Who are the people who have caused you to suffer?  What are wounds that have been inflicted during your lifetime?  What are the wounds you have inflicted on others?  How can those wounds be healed?  He also proclaims how the Cross of Christ defeated the devil and continues to defeat the enemy today.

18. Peter J. Leithart: The Tears of Things

Long ago, there were tears in Bethany, near the grave of Lazarus, a man Jesus loved: et lacrimatus est Jesus. “Jesus wept.” The Man of Sorrows groans, as much in outrage at the dominion of death as in sorrow for his friend. He rages with us against what Paul Griffiths calls “the Devastation.” He enters, more fully than we can imagine, into our God-forsakenness. Having suffered all, he can sympathize with all. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

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20. Cardinal Krajewski leading the Via Crucis in war-torn Kyiv

The Papal Almoner delivers a second ambulance donated by Pope Francis to the cardiological hospital in Kyiv. On Holy Friday he is scheduled to preside at the Way of the Cross in areas that have been destroyed by missile and bomb attacks.

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22. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion — Kölner Philharmonie

H/T theologyofhome.com

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