Seventh and Last in Lenten Series

Now that we have reached Holy Week, we are about to enter into the most beautiful liturgical week of the year. Everything that we believe as Catholic Christians is going to be reenacted and celebrated during this week. Ritually, we review and celebrate the entire history of salvation. It is a time to look back and also a time to look forward.

I have memories of experiences in Holy Week when I was in grammar school and high school. On Good Friday afternoon, I would spend three hours in silence. I can recall walking alone through some of the streets of Bay Ridge, where I grew up, visiting the parish Church, doing some spiritual reading and also doing a great deal of reflecting on my life.

Though I can’t recall many of the details of those Good Friday afternoons, I do recall emphasizing in my mind the suffering that Jesus experienced for us and my own sinfulness and unworthiness. In my mind, I may have separated Good Friday too much from Easter Sunday. Today I cannot think of Good Friday without thinking of Easter morning. Without Easter, the story of Good Friday is incomplete.
Reflecting on Good Friday and Easter and some of the ways that one or the other of the two days became prominent in my experience of being a Catholic, I wonder if, at different times in my life, I have overemphasized one to the point of neglecting the other. Forgetting either Good Friday or Easter can lead to a kind of lopsided faith, one that does not do justice to the mystery of life or the mystery of God’s involvement with us.

Delicate Balance

In “The Challenge of Jesus” (Image Books), John Shea is quite good on the balance that we should try to achieve between the light that Good Friday can shed on our experience and the way that Easter can illuminate our experience. He writes the following:

“Not balancing the cross with the resurrection, damning sin but not celebrating grace, leads to aberrations in both the personal and social orders. A person whose controlling self-image is ‘sinner’ is prone to lead a fearful life. If everything is sin from its imperfect side, from the inevitable fact that even the best efforts fall short, nothing much is ventured. Emotions are distrusted; motivations are suspect, human contact is contaminated. What develops is a hunched, frightened stance towards life….

“If the cross without the resurrection breeds deep pessimism, resurrection without the cross generates unfounded optimism. For many Catholics, an exclusive sin consciousness is yesterday’s hangup, nostalgia at best; but an exclusive resurrection consciousness is today’s temptation. This is the flower and balloon mentality that glibly passes over the heartlessness and intractability of the world... For Paul, the cross is more than the last occurrence in the life of Jesus before the beginning of His glorious risen life. The risen and exalted Christ remains the crucified Jesus. He whom you experience as risen is precisely He who is crucified.”
I know from personal experience the points that John Shea is making. If the most important truth about us is that we are sinners, if that is the predominant image that we have of ourselves, we will lead a fearful life. There was a time in my life when I thought that it was possible to slip into doing a mortal sin, to commit a mortal sin almost by mistake.

God Is Not Against Us

As I think back about how I once thought of serious sin, how I once thought that a person could wind up in hell after leading a virtuous life but in the last moment do something that warranted eternal punishment, I wonder how I ever acquired that outlook. What image of God did I have? Looking back on my attitude concerning sin and God, I think I believed in a God who was against us, a God who was just waiting for us to commit some sin.

I am concerned that I do not fall into what John Shea describes as the other extreme, the “flower and balloon” mentality. If we believe that the most important truth about us is that God loves us, if we believe that Jesus’ Resurrection has changed everything, then we have to try to incorporate that belief into our lives. One important way to do that is through loving our brothers and sisters, and loving them in such a way that we reach out to help them. While we do not have to win God’s love, we are called to respond to it and a key response is reaching out in love toward others.

This has been a wonderful Lent. Renewed, let us try joyfully to live in a more Christian manner.