The Good in Good Friday

April 24, 2011 at 12:24 pm (Uncategorized) (insights)

This was a reflection I wrote during Good Friday, but couldn’t post right away because of inability to access the net during the Triduum.

*****

I guess I’m a Catholic in the sense that I believe in almost all that I’ve learned in my Catholic school. I just have this problem with the Church’ stance on issues because it seems to be contradicting. (They call themselves Catholic, which means universal, but they won’t accept the LGBT community.) But I do see a beauty in being able to separate the faulty institution from the flawlessly perfect Jesus Christ.

*****

It could be redundant for me to post all the things that happened to Christ between the Last Supper and His Crucifixion & death. But just imagine so much happening in such a short period of time – the mixture of physical and emotional pain. Rejected after being welcomed; betrayed and denied by his close friends; mocked with a title that was rightfully His; ridiculed by people less than Him; judged with so much injustice; crucified in between two thieves. How degrading.

But during the Agony in the Garden, He was sweating blood at the thought of all these things happening. He knew that all these would come, and yet He embraced his fate. Why would He submit Himself, THE Son of God, to such acts He didn’t deserve? The way I see it, He did it for two reasons: His love for God and us, and the thought of the Resurrection.

Now how does this relate to us? Remember God said before that in order for us to be with Christ we must carry our cross and follow Him. The cross that God gives us is something He himself decided and created for us – designed to accommodate our capacities in order to develop our weaknesses. And so we must carry this with us. No matter what we’re going through, we should learn from Christ’s Passion. The strength we need to carry our cross, we should muster from knowing that at the end of this trial there is a Resurrection waiting for us. We should accept the fact that what we’re going through is going to be very much worth what God has waiting for us in the end.

Not that I want to sound preachy but I remember one trying time in my life. I’d wallow in depressing thoughts, so much perhaps that it irritated some people around me. It seemed shallow to some, but I knew it was from God because He knew my weakness exactly. This went on until I got to thinking that since it seemed so much tailored for me then there must be something for me. That’s not to say the pain didn’t go away. It was still there, but the challenge was to battle it out with the thought that something better was waiting for me out there.

True enough, I moved forward. In hindsight, it started to make sense why I had to go through that shit – to equip me for the new path I would take.

So the Good in Good Friday for me is knowing that we share the difficulties we’re going through with the Passion of Christ, and knowing that we’ll be resurrected together with Him as well.