Father Paul Weinberger, Pastor
St. William Roman Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
April 14, 2006
Good Friday
For, this happened so that the Scripture passage might be fulfilled. “Not a bone of it will be broken.” And again another passage says, “They will look upon Him Whom they have pierced.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
This is the account of the Passion of Jesus according to the eyewitness, St. John, the beloved Disciple whom Jesus loved. Jesus never gave us an account of His Passion and Death. Jesus gave us this account through His Apostle, St. John. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the Evangelists; there are no others.
Shame on National Geographic! They use to be a trusted institution in this country and now we have seen for many years that they have an agenda. They paid one million dollars for the Gospel of Judas. THERE AIN’T NO SUCH THING! The Gospel of Judas is not authenticated and yet a million dollars was spent. The National Geographic would not spend such money recklessly unless they were intending to do great harm with that piece. Our Lord is still under attack to this day. It is very sad.
On this day in history we recall His Passion of Christ on His cross, the True Cross. This day is probably the most important for the North American Continent also. I would say it is important for the South American Continent as well. On this day in 1519, Cortez and his men landed and called their first settlement Vera Cruz,meaning the True Cross. He was dressed totally in black because it was Good Friday. The conquest of Mexico began on Good Friday in 1519 and it was a bloody affair. The Gospel came to North America on Good Friday in 1519. We all look east and up north at the pilgrims for the founding Fathers of this continent. Well you have to look south and you have to look to the True Cross. The missionaries came with the conquerors bringing the Gospel to this new world and on this day the conquest of Mexico began as I have already stated.
The most historic account however is the one we have just heard; the conquering of Christ by Himself on the Cross in Jerusalem on what the Jew had previously referred to as Mount Mariah in the account of Abraham going to sacrifice his son, Isaac. God sent an angel to stay the hand of Abraham so that Abraham would not dispatch the boy. When it came time for God’s own Son, God allowed what He did not allow with Abraham and Isaac.
If you recall there was a ram that had the horns on his head caught in some thorns. Is all this kind of sounding familiar to today? A ram, a male caught there was sacrificed on the altar that Abraham built. The ram, Isaac and so many other images in the Old Testament prefigure or anticipate the Sacrifice of Jesus, the Sacrifice of Jesus on the altar of the Cross.
Good Friday is the only day on the calendar of the Church where Mass is not offered. You see before you a dining room table just like you could purchase at Haverty’s. Right? No! Recently you have seen dining room tables appearing in some Catholic Churches. Uh huh! Well, this is not a dining room table; this is an Altar. This Altar is bare and normally there is an Altar cloth on it. Normally it is covered or clothed. The Altar is without a cloth because it represents Christ. Look at that Crucifix up there and you see how the artist depicts Christ on the Cross. Christ has a loincloth on. He didn’t have a loincloth on 2000 years ago. They removed all of His clothes, all of them! He was naked! There is no doubt that He was naked and there was not a stitch of clothing on Him. Look at that Altar, it is naked and bare!
You see, Christ is the Priest, the Altar, and the Lamb of Sacrifice. He is all of these and as we see these three days go by, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday/Easter Sunday, we see different aspects of this reality. We see Christ today in His Divine Mercy; He allows Himself to be Crucified. He affirms that He is Jesus…”I AM”, just as St. Peter says…”I am not.” It is interesting that when Jesus says, I AM”, just the force of Him saying those words the men were knocked down to the ground. I AM is how God identified Himself in the Old Testament. The Jews would not speak the Name of God but Christ spoke His Name.
I AM the Son of God.
With just the force of His words, men are knocked to the ground. But Jesus restrains Himself because He could have called down a whole army of angels. Instead He allows Himself to be tortured, stripped, spat upon, degraded and crucified. Probably the worse thing for Him was looking at His best Disciple, His mother, sinless from her Immaculate Conception, who saw Him up there on the cross and was causing her great torture. This is torture we can only begin to meditate upon.
This is a Sacrifice that had to go forward. This is a Sacrifice, which replaced the sacrifice of the Aztecs. The best estimates of the sacrifices of the Aztecs were fifty thousand a year at least, including babies, children, teens and adults. They’d slaughtered in sacrifice over eighty thousand people over the course of several days to bathe in blood one of the great pyramids there in Mexico. This Sacrifice of Christ came on this day in 1519 to replace the bloody and terrible human sacrifices of the Aztecs.
God would not permit Abraham to sacrifice Isaac but God allowed His own Son to be the Victim, the Lamb of Sacrifice. Christ Himself is the great High Priest, Who offers this Sacrifice for all! Today the Gospel ends in these words.
For all of this happened so that the Scripture passage might be fulfilled. Not a bone of IT will be broken.
Not a bone of it? It what? What is IT? . Not a bone of IT will be broken. Just after we knelt and then stood up and we heard these words.
For all of this happened so that the Scripture passage might be fulfilled. Not a bone of IT will be broken.
Every Jew knew exactly to what that was referring. The first Passover Lamb prepared according to the instructions God had given to Moses. It had to be a male, a perfect one without blemish. That is from Exodus 12. Jesus is the Lamb of God. We say it at every Mass, that Jesus is the Lamb without blemish; no sin upon that Soul!
We hear again and again in St. John’s Gospel that it was preparation day. Every year in the temple the High Priest would prepare the lambs for the Passover meal. People would journey to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover there. It was a great honor. The priests, beginning in the sixth hour on that day of preparation slaughtered the lambs. Jesus was handed over to be crucified at about the sixth hour on the preparation day. Jesus is that Lamb…Not a bone of “IT” will be broken. No bones of the first Passover lamb could be broken and again we find this in Exodus 12:46. Jesus’ bones were not broken and we just heard this. A soldier did break the bones of the two criminals…oh, excuse me, the revolutionaries, whatever that means, which were crucified on either side of Christ. But he took a different approach with Jesus.
The custom among the Romans was to verify the death of the individual by thrusting a spear in the very heart of the victim. The legs of the two thieves were broken so they could die faster but when they came to Jesus He was already dead. There was no need to break His legs but instead the side was pierced.
When they came to Jesus and saw He was already dead they did not break His legs but one soldier thrust his lance into His side and immediately blood and water flowed out. An eyewitness has testified and his testimony is true. He knows that he is speaking the truth so that you also may come to believe.
St. John is talking about himself. It is a literary device to declare his being an eyewitness. So the soldier pierced the side of Christ and blood and water came forth. The blood would be used from the Passover lamb to spare the people inside their homes from the avenging angel of God and the blood and water that came out of the Lamb of God was for exactly the same reason; to spare us from God’s avenging anger for the way we have ruined what He has given to us. Christ is the Priest Who offers the Sacrifice.
The Gospel of Judas, which is no Gospel at all, mentions that Christ cut a deal with Judas to turn Him in so that all this would happen. When you start getting the lies they are like a train; one is connected to another, connected to another, and then connected to another. Jesus, as the Great High Priest, offers the Sacrifice and offers it freely and under no duress. He is the Sacrifice itself. The priests in the temple would offer bulls, goats, and sheep, but Jesus is the Great High Priest, Who offers Himself and the Altar on which He offers Himself is the Cross.
Now since today is the day we don’t offer Mass, the only day on the calendar, just look at some of the many ways this is mirrored in the Mass. When I offer Mass I take the bread, unleavened bread. What kind of bread did they use at the first Passover? They used unleavened bread. At the Offertory the priest offers the bread then he takes the chalice with the wine in it and pours just a drop of water into the chalice. They are offered separately. When you separate body and blood it could be a classic definition of death, right? Separating body and blood is death.
When the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is offered upon the ALTAR and NOT a dining room table, the priest is acting in the Person of Christ, the great High Priest, and the same Sacrifice that we read about from St. John’s Gospel on the Passion is re-presented in an unbloody manner. In fact, when the priest takes the Host at the Lamb of God and breaks the Host, this is a symbol of the Body of Christ being broken 2000 years ago in this Sacrifice on the Cross. But after breaking the Host a small portion of the Host is dropped into the chalice. Perhaps all these years it has gone unnoticed, but a small part of the Consecrated Sacred Host is dropped into the Consecrated Sacred Blood and what had been separated has been reunited. It is a way of emphasizing that, when we receive Holy Communion we are not receiving a mere symbol or reminder of Christ like some post-it note that says to buy eggs and get milk.
Remember Jesus! This is His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Why in the world would Jesus do all of this for me? Why would he suffer and die for me and allow this to happen to Himself? That is the million-dollar question. Would I suffer for Him?
“Yes Lord, I would suffer for You and I would die!”
That is what St. Peter said and we probably say the same thing and act just as St. Peter did. Anyway, Christ suffered for us because He saw us suffering in our sins so terribly. He died on the Altar of the Cross so that He could, in His Sacrifice, put to death the hold that death has on us.
So, the Risen and Glorified Body of Christ is that which we partake of each time we approach to receive Holy Communion; the Risen, Glorified, Life-giving Body of Christ, broken and poured out for us on this day 2000 years ago.
Remember Pope John Paul II died the Sunday after Easter. On this day in 2005 Pope John Paul II wrote this on Holy Thursday and he is talking about the Sacrifice of Christ and he talks about how we can talk about the Eucharist, Holy Communion, and how it is the True Presence of Christ.
Every theological explanation which seeks some understanding of this Mystery, in order to be in accord with the Catholic faith, must firmly maintain that in objective reality independently of our mind, the bread and wine have ceased to exist after the Consecration so that the adorable Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus form that moment on are really before us under the Sacramental Species of bread and wine.
It still looks like unleavened bread, still looks like wine. This is the mystery that the Church refers to as Transubstantiation. Christ, Who offered Himself to His Apostles at the Last Supper on Holy Thursday night is the High Priest Who offers the Sacrifice on the Altar of the Cross as the Lamb of God on Good Friday to continue an abiding Presence with us; not a symbolic presence but a real true abiding Presence through the mystery of His Resurrection. His Risen, Glorified Life-giving Body is given to us in Holy Communion.
Just as a place was prepared for the Crucified and dead Body of Christ by Joseph of Arimathaea, everyone who calls himself Catholic should make sure that a very special place has been prepared for the True Body and Blood of Christ, the Real Presence and the Lamb of God. This is why we approach Holy Communion with fear and trembling. And when we are not ready to receive such an exalted Guest because we have knowledge of mortal sin on our soul, we don’t approach to receive Holy Communion under those circumstances. If it has happened in the past, confess it and never let it happen again.
This True and abiding Presence of Christ was made possible for us 2000 years ago, not on the coast of Mexico but on Mount Mariah, which is now called Jerusalem, just outside the walls of the holy city. Our Lord gives us His own Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity to save us from the avenging wrath that we rightly deserve because of our sins. This is why the Divine Mercy is tied up with yesterday and today, going forward to the Sunday after Easter. God saw us suffering and wiggling around like a worm on a hook just before it is lowered into the water. He saw us skewered in our sins. Nothing could save us so He did. No one had a gun to His head and He didn’t make a sweet deal with Judas. He didn’t just fall into it like Gomer Pile but understood exactly what was happening.
Jesus laid down His life for His friends and His friends have mistreated Him so miserably ever since. For us, when we recognize that we have mistreated Him, we dust ourselves off and ask His forgiveness through a Sacramental Confession and we go back to receiving Him in Holy Communion. As Catholics we recognize the Mystery before us and it is something we will never completely understand, not in this life anyway. The rational mind cannot fully understand the infinite Mystery of this Sacrifice and so we ponder it and meditate upon it. In reading these Scriptures we are reminded of different aspects but it guides us from Holy Thursday to Good Friday, to Holy Saturday and Easter and beyond.
Let us not take this Sacrifice for granted. On the one day that we don’t have Mass we meditate on the Mass. We wish we could have Mass today but instead the Holy Communion that was Consecrated last night at the Holy Thursday Mass will be distributed today at this Holy service on Good Friday.
Let us meditate on Christ who has given Himself as the grape is squeezed to produce the wine for this Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Jesus has allowed Himself to be the wheat crushed for our bread for this Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. As He prayed so often on the Mount of Olives, the olive is pressed to produce the oil. This Good Friday let us concentrate on the complete and life-giving Holy Sacrifice of the Mass which Christ uses to nourish us with His own flesh as He is beginning the human family all over again. If we do not eat His Flesh and drink His Blood He states so clearly in St. John’s Gospel that, “we will have no Life within us!”
Tomorrow we will celebrate the Easter Vigil anew and His Risen, Glorified Body will strengthen us and slowly form us. We will not partake of the dead Body of the Crucified Christ, but the Crucified and Risen Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ, the whole resurrected Christ.
For, this happened so that the Scripture passage might be fulfilled. “Not a bone of it will be broken.” And again another passage says, “They will look upon Him Whom they have pierced.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen