By Fr. Adolf Washington
Oliver Cromwell, the 17th century, English military leader and later Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England,ordered a young soldier to be shot dead in public for his crimes. The execution was to be carried out at the ringing of the evening curfew bell. It shocked everyone when the bell did not ring.
Cromwell found a young girl had climbed the belfry and gripped the clapper of the bell so tight to prevent it from ringing, that her hands were bruised and bleeding. When she told Cromwell that the young soldier was her lover and did not want him to die, Cromwell’s heart was so touched that he said “Your lover shall live because of your sacrifice. Curfew shall not ring tonight!”
Great love is always expressed in great sacrifice, involving letting-go of things dear to us if it could express that depth of our love towards another.
If we wondered what’s so ‘Good’ about ‘Good Friday’ which commemorates the day Jesus was hammered to death on a cross, it finds answer in Jesus’ own words “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 5:13).
The ultimate expression of love is when you give all and that what you love the most, that is why the Gospel of John declares ‘God loved the world so much, that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16).
Good Friday is ‘good’ because it is God’s ultimate expression of His goodness toward us, as everything that lead to Jesus’ death revealed that true love is to give oneself for others and to forgive even to the point of death. To put self-glory and pride behind and practice self-giving, to love even when we are hurt. Jesus’ death revealed the highest point of being ‘good’.
You cannot become Holy if you don’t strive towards such goodness.
Saint Paul in his letter to the Phillippians sums it up “though He (Jesus) was in the form of God, He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phillippians 2:6-8).