Good Friday 2025
This evening I’d like to focus on the words Jesus spoke from the cross in John’s gospel. Each gospel has its own scenario. Each gospel has its own image of Jesus and what he says from the cross. In John’s passion account which we just read, Jesus speaks from the cross three times.
Let’s consider the first time. Jesus is there hanging in agony. We see the soldiers who nailed him there and we hear the crowd fling insults at him. But among the noisy crowd and looking up to him in great distress are his mother and a few faithful followers. He sees his mother standing there. Or perhaps she has fallen to her knees and is clinging to the cross trying to reach him. He has to leave her now, but he does not want to leave her alone. One of his beloved followers is there, too, and Jesus says to his mother, “Woman, that is your son.” He asks her to receive that disciple of his as her own son. That is your son from now on. And to make the new connection clear, he says to the disciple, “That is your mother.”
In this very symbolic moment, Jesus makes his mother the mother of not only one, but of all his followers. And we are told that the disciple truly received Jesus’ mother as his own. She is now the mother of all the faithful, and she knows what it is when the children Jesus has given her have to undergo some share of the pain and suffering that Jesus had to bear. She is there with her mother’s love clinging to us in whatever pain we may be suffering—physical pain, psychological pain, or the pain we may be feeling from people around us or from the society in which we live. We pray to our Mother Mary: “And after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus.”
The second time Jesus speaks, it is from the depths of his torment—“I thirst!” I lived in Hiroshima for many years and have heard atomic bomb survivors describe the horror of that infamous day 80 years ago. Those who did not die immediately were badly burned and tormented with thirst. “Water! Give me water!” they cried. Those who were able to move made their way to one of the nearby rivers. Jesus knows our thirst and the thirst of the victims of contemporary bombings in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Myanmar. When God became man in Jesus, he experienced our whole life, all the way to being executed as a state criminal. When wars or natural calamities occur, we hear people crying out “Where is God in all this?” Well, he is there with them in their agony, having suffered from man’s malice, and through his suffering he has opened the door to our reconciliation with God and with one another.
The last time Jesus speaks, he says “It is finished!” What is finished? we ask. We can get a hint if we look back at chapter 17 of John’s gospel, where Jesus prays to his Father. “I have glorified you on earth and finished the work that you gave me to do. … I have made your name known to the men you took from the world to give me. .. Holy Father, keep those you have given me true to your name, so that they may be one like us. … I am not asking you to remove them from the world, but to protect them from the evil one. … I pray not only for these, but for those also who through their words will believe in me.” “For all those who will believe in me”—that’s us! And we are here tonight to thank Jeus for all that he underwent to be one with us and to bring us close to him—in our daily life as well as in our own future death, whenever that may come. “Hide me within your wounds. Never let me be separated from you. In the hour of my death call me and bid me come to you, where I may praise you with all your holy ones for ever and ever. Amen.”
Robert Chiesa Sj