My very own Good Friday

Christ's incarnation is an invitation from God to share in His life in a more full way. God stoops down to become man. In this way He invites me to become a man in the way he became a man. The Christian life of virtue flows from this concept. This is why people for thousands of years have devoted their life to understanding how Christ lived and how to imitate Him.

In the same way, the Christian would point to pain and suffering as salvific if only because Christ shows us that it is. Christ suffered pain and died for the sins of all. If suffering was not salvific before Christ's incarnation, it certainly is now. Christ invites us to accept the pains of this world, just or unjust, in the same way that he did: as a means to sanctify and purify.

The Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen famously speaks of suffering as necessary for salvation: Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. This is the great mystery of Christianity, for some complicated collection of reasons, suffering seems to be necessary for true and complete joy.

As Passion Week begins this year, I cannot help but reflect upon my own failures to fully enter into my Lenten practices. I have remained undisciplined and lukewarm throughout the entirety of the season. I have not allowed my disciplines to turn me towards Christ, I have merely allowed them to be inconveniences. Have I wasted this time? Has this time of Christ been wasted on me?

In some ways, this time has been wasted, but in others, it has been truly fruitful. I have been unable to focus myself on the disciplines of Lent largely because I have been distracted by more worries than I ever have experienced in my entire life. In a strange way, God has been taking me through, what I may judge to be, a very unnecessary amount of internal agony. I have been unable to focus on the exterior disciplines because I have been ripped open. My interior life has been exposed to my exterior life. I am more vulnerable than I have perhaps ever been. 

This is what God does with a sinner like me. He must allow me to fall apart because I do not trust in Him. Once I fall apart, I will be reminded of my need for Him, and I will invite Him into myself as I begin to rebuild. My only failure in Lent so far is that I have failed to invite God into this vulnerability. This is my Good Friday.

Good Fridays are easy to create. Anybody can create a Good Friday. Anybody can watch as their life falls apart. Anybody can die nailed, against their will, upon a cross. Only one man has been able to rise again to life. This is where I must invite God in if I am ever to truly be rebuilt. Then, if God allows, I can have my very own Easter Sunday.


Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. The Cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the crown of thorns is the preface to the halo of light.   When all is said and done, there are only two philosophies of life. One is first the feast, then the hangover; the other, first the fast and then the feast. Deferred joys purchased by sacrifices are always sweetest and most enduring. Christianity begins not with sunshine but with defeat. Sunshine religions that begin with psychic elation, end often in disillusionment and despair. If we leave the Cross out of the Life of Christ, we have nothing and certainly not Christianity. For the Cross is related to our sins.  Christ was our 'stand-in' on the stage of life. He took our guilt as if He were guilty and thus paid the debt that sin deserved, namely, death. This made possible our resurrection to a 'new life' in Him. Therefore, He is not just a teacher or a peasant revolutionist, but  Our Savior. - Fulton Sheen

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