Jesus Forgives
Friday, April 3, 2026
Good Friday
Father Richard offers a guided meditation, inviting listeners to be present with Jesus at the crucifixion:
Picture yourself before the crucified Jesus; recognize that he became what you fear: nakedness, exposure, vulnerability, and failure. He became sin to free you from sin (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). He became what we do to one another in order to free us from the lie of punishing and scapegoating each other. He became the crucified so we would stop crucifying. He refused to transmit his pain onto others.
Richard imagines Jesus speaking these words to us, offering God’s love and forgiveness:
My beloved, I am your self. I am your beauty. I am your goodness, which you are destroying. I am what you do to what you should love. I am what you are afraid of: your deepest and best and most naked self—your soul. Your sin largely consists in what you do to harm goodness—your own and others’. You are afraid of the good; you are afraid of me. You kill what you should love; you hate what could transform you. I am Jesus crucified. I am yourself, and I am all of humanity.
We are invited to respond to Jesus on the cross:
Jesus, Crucified, you are my life and you are also my death. You are my beauty, you are my possibility, and you are my full self. You are everything I want, and you are everything I am afraid of. You are everything I desire, and you are everything I deny. You are my outrageously ignored and neglected soul.
Jesus, your love is what I most fear. I can’t let anybody love me for nothing. Intimacy with you or anyone terrifies me.
I am beginning to see that I, in my own body, am an image of what is happening everywhere, and I want it to stop today. I want to stop the violence toward myself, toward the world, toward you. I don’t need to ever again create any victim, even in my mind.
You alone, Jesus, refused to be crucifier, even at the cost of being crucified. You never asked for sympathy. You never played the victim or asked for vengeance. You breathed forgiveness.
We humans mistrust, murder, and attack. Now I see that it is not you that humanity hates. We hate ourselves, but we mistakenly kill you. I must stop crucifying your blessed flesh on this earth and in my brothers and sisters.
Now I see that you live in me and I live in you. You are inviting me out of this endless cycle of illusion and violence. You are Jesus crucified. You are saving me. In your perfect love, you have chosen to enter into union with me, and I am slowly learning to trust that this could be true.
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John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”
– Brother Lawrence in Practicing the Presence of God
At one point this past week, we were out to dinner, and one of the people from our group said that Practicing the Presence of God had utterly changed the way she thought about work around the house.
Doing dishes.
Walking the dog.
Folding laundry.
Taking the trash out.
Restocking toilet paper.
Mopping the floor.
Making the bed.
Sort the mail.
Do some emails.
Modern culture tells us we must always be doing something grand, explosive, or extreme, but a spirituality of presence and depth is actually more interesting in the little things... Because, after all, our lives are chock full of the little things.
2.
“For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.”
The letter of 1 Peter, which tradition holds was written by the actual Apostle Peter, is hitting me differently after being at the Tomb of St. Peter.
Just before Peter was crucified on an inverted cross, he was clearly trying to help the Christians live while under Roman occupation. During the time of the first century, there were many rumors swirling about the Christians being “atheists” who did not have a temple of their own and who practiced cannibalism (it was actually the Eucharist).
In 64 AD, Rome caught on fire, and Nero did nothing to stop it. It ended up burning down a massive section (which he then rebuilt for himself), and he blamed it on the Christians.
So, of course, Peter encouraged the Christians to be of the utmost moral quality, to help “silence the ignorant talk of foolish people” who kept feeding the gossip and rumors that Christians were ruining Rome.
3.
“As surely as I live,’ says the Lord,
‘Every knee will bow before me;
Every tongue will εχομολογησεται God.”
Εχομολογησεται (exomologesetai) is the Greek word that is often translated as “confess” in most English translations.
However…
The word “confess” often carries a negative connotation.
If we take a moment to look up other meanings of the word, they are all positive! The word can also be translated to mean “openly and joyfully profess without reservation.”
This is why I believe that it is vitally important to read the Bible in the original languages, if possible. There are so many nuances that are missed, such as this one!
4.
“When one loves, one does not calculate.”
Man, how good is this?
This past week, a fellow traveler did a great job of convincing me to read Therese of Lisieux next. Although her writings can be seen as a bit “saccharine” by some, others find them quite beautiful.
I love this quote about love. It challenges me. I often calculate the cost/risk/worth of loving others, and it has not served me.
Fortunately, the whole of the Christian faith is built around love, and it keeps pointing me back to its primacy. I am beyond certain that I would be a miserable wreck without my faith.
5.
“We are convinced that believing in God is worthwhile. We thereby want to express the conviction that it is not death that has the last word but life; it is not the absurd but the full meaning in life that wins the day.”
– Leonardo Boff, Brazilian Liberation Theologian
I don’t have anything to add to this.
Some quotes just speak for themselves.
