Good Friday, April 10

Scripture for the Day:

 

 “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say-- `Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?”Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.”    – John 12:27-35

Reflection – Ralph Nazareth 

 “Now, don’t you fall asleep with Peter and James and John,” I hear my mother whispering to me. And I’m back there again in that world of shadows.

 The hour is late, Jesus sweats blood, pleading with his Father to let the cup of sorrow pass over him, and I am in the pathetic huddle of men, overcome by sleep. This vivid and troubling memory is for me inseparable from the persistence of guilt in my life.

 Yet, I’m drawn, although with deep trepidation, by this very same sense of failure, to the Gethsemane of the Synoptics more readily than to the scene outside the temple in Jerusalem that John describes in the reading for the day. The passion and desolation of Jesus in the former penetrate me to the core and vivify me in a way that the apparent triumphalism of the latter does not. Do I then refuse to be counted among the “children of light” if I stay with the man who says, “Now my soul is troubled…”? And know that the only true rising is at the zero hour when he is “lifted up from the earth” on Golgotha?