Silence before the cross. Good Friday (A)

On Palm Sunday we read the Passion of Christ, and we saw that it was important to enter into the Passion as one more character in the story. Today, after reading the Passion, it will be good to be silent. The rubrics for today's celebration encourage silence after the Passion. The priest is encouraged to invite the people to remain in prayerful silence.

The readings of today's liturgy are charged with the intensity of passion and emotion. They all revolve around the mystery of the Cross. The passage of the servant of God in the prophecy of Isaiah is full of suffering, with very strong descriptions of suffering: «Disfigured, He did not look like a man, nor did He have a human aspect, ... without figure, without beauty. We saw him without an attractive appearance, despised and avoided by men, like a man of sorrows, accustomed to sufferings, before whom faces were hidden, despised and rejected.».

In the Letter to the Hebrews, we see Christ as the high priest offering himself with loud cries and tears, learning obedience through suffering. In the Passion of Christ according to St. John, we have just witnessed the betrayal, arrest, suffering, death and burial of Christ in a short period of time. In the face of such intense readings, there is no need for words, only silence. We need time and prayerful silence to assimilate it all. Today is a day marked by silence. God has died. Jesus died. He died freely out of love for us to redeem us from sin and death.

Silence before the Cross. Contemplate in silence the fruit of love, a complete and total love. Looking at the Cross, we will always encounter love, because it was love that led Jesus to the Cross. As St. Josemaría writes: «It is Love that brought Jesus to Calvary. And already on the Cross, all his gestures and all his words are of love, of serene and strong love».».

An eyewitness, standing at the foot of the cross, silently observed what was happening to the body of Jesus on the Cross. After Jesus was pierced in the side and blood and water flowed out, we read: «He who saw it bears witness, and his testimony is true, and he knows that he speaks the truth, so that you also may believe.».

I remember one day I saw a crucifix on which the nail holding Jesus on the Cross was designed with the emoji of love, trying to show that it is not the nails, but love, that keeps Jesus on the Cross. With a prayerful silence before the Cross we experience love in a special way.