GOOD FRIDAY
The story of the death of Jesus that we have just heard (John 18:1-19:42) should help us to pray, especially when we hit hard and painful times in our life, when prayer becomes agonisingly difficult. Twice in my life this has happened to me. The first was when my mother died. I was in my 20’s and I was devastated, and every time I tried to pray I began to weep.
Two things helped me then. The first was to remember that when I wept with God I was actually praying, or more correctly God was praying in me. St Paul says in Romans Chapter 8 when we cannot pray “God’s Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words”. So today we look at the Cross and remember that whenever we weep, whenever we suffer, Jesus is alongside us and within us, weeping and suffering with us and for us
The second way I found to pray when in distress, was to do what Jesus did in his agony and pain on the cross. In such times, when words fail us, then like Jesus we can simply use familiar words to stand for the words we cannot say. Jesus used the psalms, for they were his hymn book, and he knew them by heart. “My God. my God why have you forsaken me” … “Into your hands I commend my spirit”
We too can use such words, either reading them from the Psalms as I did, or using a favourite hymn or bible passage. Whatever we choose to say, even dragging ourselves through the Our Father or the Rosary when we do not feel like saying anything to God, all this will be taken by God and accepted with our tears within the one sacrificial offering of Jesus.
But there is one more way that we are taught to pray today as we stand at the foot of the cross. It is the prayer of silence….
In the end the most powerful prayer that Jesus utters has no words at all. The Bible cannot really record the silence. It speaks of the three hours that Jesus hung on the cross, but then inevitably it records the few words that he said… But in the end most of his time on the cross would have been a long drawn out silent agony of suffering and death - and then finally, the silence of death itself.
We need to remind ourselves today of the power of that silence. His dying and his death defeat death and save the world, and they take place in silence. Think of the famous words from Lamentations (3:22-26) that I am sure Jesus knew well:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.”
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly: for the salvation of the Lord.
So when words fail us, when we try to pray, when there are no more tears, and when even familiar words fail us, we can be assured that the offering of our silent agony to God is more powerful than any words. For in the silence, we are joined by Jesus. He joins his silence to ours and that is how he saves the world.
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