Day 39 - Holy Friday

When Jesus had received the vinegar, He said, “It is finished”; and He bowed His head and gave up His spirit. John 19:30 (Gospel of the Ninth Hour on Good Friday Morning)

I have talked occasionally in the course of these reflections and in the short sermons this week about how Holy Week and Pascha bring us “full circle” in our journey of salvation. From God asking Adam and Eve where they were in the Garden compared to asking Judas why he was there, to the woman wiping Jesus feet with her hair, the same feet that were heard in the Garden, there are many images the Church gives is to see how the things that took place at the original sin come full circle and are transformed in Jesus Christ.

Fr. Stavros talks today about trees, and how we were condemned by a tree and also saved by a tree. It is another beautiful example of completing the circle of salvation. There is also a small section of his reflection that I found very powerful.

Earlier in his reflections, Fr. Stavros had wrote about how the death of Jesus was different from what we see depicted in movies and often different that in life. Jesus “bowed his head and gave up His Spirit”. We have heard this read a number of times the last two days. In movies it is the other way around. People are usually fighting to cling to life, and it is only after death that their head bows, or falls down.

Now if we combine that understanding of Jesus’ death with the words He said right before His death: “it is finished”, we can truly begin to grasp the completeness of that circle of salvation. Those words of Christ were not a signal that He was giving up, that He had been defeated. They were just the opposite. Jesus’ death on the cross brought the path of salvation laid out by God to its joyous conclusion. From the moment that Adam and Eve partook of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to the point of Jesus death, God had a plan for us, a plan to bring us back to Him. When Jesus says it is finished, He speaks of the salvific work of God for mankind. Now, life, eternal life in the presence of God, is possible once again.

This evening we will lovingly place the burial shroud of our Lord in the tomb in the Church. There will be sadness at the remembering of what was done to Him. But that sadness is tinged with light and the joy of the knowledge of the Resurrection.

It is finished…salvation has come.

In Christ

Fr. David