April 10/Good Friday
For all my foes I am an object of reproach, a laughingstock to my neighbors, and a dread to my friends; they who see me abroad flee from me.
I am forgotten like the unremembered dead; I am like a dish that is broken. ~ Ps 31.12-13
When I was a little girl I had a treasured doll collection — everything from a Madame Alexander Israeli girl to a kimono-clad Japanese woman to a porcelain beauty with January inscribed across her pinafore (for the month of my birth). One day I returned home from school to find January in pieces, inadvertently knocked over by Frances, our housekeeper. With solid intentions, Frances glued the pieces back together, but the doll was never the same, ugly cracks marring her dainty face. In the Christian life, brokenness does not have the last word, even on this sad and solemn day. Lent this year has seemed particularly sacrificial and long, with suffering and loss everywhere. We may feel fractured — like a broken vessel, in pieces, shattered, our lives damaged, perhaps, beyond repair. And yet on this day, imitating Christ, we can — we must — offer up the shards of our lives to our LORD. Depleted and suffering on the cross, Jesus committed his weary spirit and broken body to God’s care, in his agony uttering words from this psalm: “Into your hand I commit my spirit.” These moments of despair are the precise moments in which we should reach out to God. God will gather us up, wipe away our tears, knit up our wounds, and send us back out into the world, on the wings of His love, to carry forward his generous self-giving in our own lives. Three days from now, Christ suffering will become Christ triumphant, rising from his body’s brokenness to a newness of life. We, too, in the fullness of God’s time, may find the shattered pieces repaired and reassembled. And we will never be the same, the cracks gone, transformed by God’s glory, and transported to the holiness and beauty of life eternal.
O perfect God, Give me the courage today to trust in you and to show imperfection to you and to others. Amen.
To hear the King’s College (Cambridge) Choir sing “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded” by J.S. Bach, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M4uUJibpvw
For today’s readings, click here: http://cms.usccb.org/bible/readings/041020.cfm
