Good Friday - 2024: Unite your sufferings with Jesus on the cross

The challenge of preaching on Good Friday is that the Passion contains too much content to do it adequately, let along completely. To employ a cliche, it’s like drinking from a firehose. Just to give one example, I could talk about how Jesus begins our salvation from sin in a garden. He enters a garden to undo the destruction wrought by Adam and Eve in the Garden. Jesus’ is, therefore, the new and more perfect Adam sent to reverse the punishment of death that was given to Adam and Eve through disobedience. That’s just one piece in a million pieces I could focus on.

Instead, I really felt God drawing me to the words of Fr. Etienne Huard, a monk of Conception Abbey in Missouri this morning. He wrote

“As we venerate the cross and meditate on Christ’s passion, let us also unite our own sufferings, struggles, and burdens with His. Just as Jesus embraced His cross with courage and love, may we learn to embrace our crosses with faith and trust in God’s providence.”

Some people criticize Christianity because they say it is an escape. They think we are praying to a higher power in the hopes that God will be nice to us and make our life easy. Indeed, that seems to be the message of some mega church pastors who believe in the so-called prosperity gospel.

Contrary to this message is the passion we read. Being a faithful follower of Jesus means accepting that there are sufferings and uniting them to His sufferings. It doesn’t mean we get to avoid them, as though he anesthetizes us from them. Or that he makes them enjoyable, as though we become masochists. Instead, we can find meaning in suffering. It unites us to him. Fear is from the evil one but suffering is different. We are tempted to react to suffering and sorrow with fear but that only makes us paralyzed. If we can unite our sufferings with Jesus on the cross and share them with him, we may find that he lightens the load because he always takes more than us. But, ultimately, we also get to see that there is a larger plan to this world and he trusts us and loves us so much that God even lets us share in it.