Good Friday

Today is perhaps the day of the greatest irony on our calendar. It is Good Friday, the day we Christians remember the crucifixion of out Lord Jesus Christ.

It doesn't seem that it should be called good. On the surface, the celebration (perhaps veneration is a better word) of someone's death, particularly a rather gruesome one, seems odd to say the least. Yet that is an interpretation based solely on earthly terms. When you consider that the great Divinity was involved, it casts an entirely different light on the situation.

God sent His only Son to be humiliated, to suffer and die horribly, for us. Such a great act cannot be seen except as fantastic. How could a sacrifice of that magnitude be seen in other than a positive light?

We cannot rightly see it any other way. Remember what Aquinas teaches: Christ is either lunatic, liar, or Lord. He Himself gives us no option but to answer the question in that frame. He claimed He could forgive others' sins: sins committed (on the surface) against other people by other people. That itself is effrontery or lunacy or even diabolical if He is not part of the Godhead. If He cannot actually do that, if He does not really have that power, then He lies or is insane. If He lies or is insane, then we cannot trust anything else He may say or teach or do. It's that simple.

Yet if we choose the example which faith recommends, if we see Him as Lord of all based on His actions in life and death as well as through the testimony of his trusted companions, then we see the need for praise and holy fear which His death illustrates to us. We understand what that death means: that the God of all humanity will not forsake humanity to her own selfish desires. He will give us an out, if you will, by living the greatest love of all: to give one's life for one's friends.

When the greatest One does that, what choice do we have but to call it Good?

So Much Straw

Panis angelicus, fit panis hominum
-St. Thomas Aquinas

If you are Catholic, perhaps at this moment the tune of that great hymn from the Angelic Doctor is wafting gently through your mind right now. I rather hope that it is; it is one of the most beautiful tunes I know, one of the few with that genuine ethereal standing which makes many of us fall victim to what C. S. Lewis calls that 'inconsolable longing'. It is like, for myself anyway, Beethoven's Ode to Joy or Schubert's Ave Maria.

And yet it is only so much straw.

How can that be? How can such wondrous and glorious tunes be nothing more than cattle feed? Yet we have it on the word of St. Thomas himself that that is precisely the case. For he said, after a Beatific vision, a view of Christ and Heaven which he was granted about six months before he died, "All my works seem like straw after what I have seen". The greatest mind in all of human history, the man, the philosopher, the theologian beyond measure, and what he did is meaningless compared to what is really real.

Only so much straw.

Can we feel anything but humility at such a fantastic attitude? Can we even actually grasp the meaning of what Aquinas says? Nothing here, not the most important things we can say, things we can see, things we might touch and hear and smell, is worth the time of day when set next to the greatest things.

Only so much straw.

There is a lesson in that.