“Even though he was crucified in weakness, he lives through the power of God!” (2 Corinthians 13:4, EOB)
On many occasions in the Old Testament God appears to have human attributes, human emotions, human limits. God takes the dust of the earth to fashion human beings and breathes into the dust of the earth to create life. God walks in the Garden of Eden. God is saddened by human evil and grieves over having created humans. And while we who have sophistication today realize God doesn’t have hands and feet and lungs nor eyes and ears, we also realize that all of these primitive anthropomorphic descriptions of the invisible, incomprehensible, and ineffable God, prepared us humans for the incarnation, when God in fact took on flesh and became human. Not just any human, but perfect human. He became what we are created to be. And, as a human, our God takes upon Himself our mortal nature, dying on a cross for us. Holy Friday is the day on which we contemplate God’s love for us. God endures everything we have to endure in His creation, including suffering and death. Divine Love knows no limits, descending not only to earth but into Hades itself to restore life to all. With His death on the cross, God shows His love for us is complete, total and absolute.
“It is finished!
Finally finished and finally completed.
Finished and completed: “Behold the man” (John 19:5), the true human being, the image of God, the one who loved us till the end, even if I do not know him and do not comprehend him.
‘Among the gods there is not like thee O Lord; neither are there any works like thy works’ (Ps. 86:8).
God’s ways are past our understanding, shattering every constraint that limits our feeble imagination.
Christ shows us his divinity, not in a superhuman–inhuman–manner, but as truly human, human in the end common to us all.
Put to death on the cross, he yet voluntarily laid down his life in love for us, showing us what it is to be God in the way that he dies as human, for us.
And so, for us mortals, he opens up the possibility to share in his life, to live the life of God himself.
If he had shown us what it is to be truly human in any other way, what part could I have had in it?
But by his death, his life lived for others, a path of sacrifice and service, in his love and compassion for us, he has shown us a more noble way still, beyond our self-aggrandizing aspirations and merely human projections. And this life has led, as it must to the grave; yet it is not bound by the tomb.” (Fr John Behr, The Cross Stands while the World Turns: Homilies for the Cycles of the Year, pp. 66-67)
God became human in order to die for us on the cross, to descend to the place of the dead in order to destroy death. What we truly commemorate and celebrate on Holy Friday is not only the death of the Son of God, but the death of death itself. God overthrows the tyranny which Death claimed over humanity.
Fraternized 