God – The Anguished Companion!

Friday, April 18, 2025

Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion

Is 52: 13-53:12; Heb 4:14-16, 5: 7-9; Jn 18: 1-19:42

On Good Friday, we reflect on the depth of God’s love through his sacrifice on the cross. 

How can we understand God’s love in the suffering of Jesus? 

I believe we can approach the suffering of Jesus from a horrific incident narrated by Eliezer Wiesel in his book Night.

A prisoner of the concentration camp himself, Wiesel writes about the hanging of three inmates (two adults and a young boy) for unjust reasons and the conversation on God that followed. 

‘The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks. ‘Long live liberty!’ shouted the two men. But the boy was silent. ‘Where is merciful God, where is He?’ someone behind me was asking. At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over. Total silence in the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. As for the rest of us, we were weeping. ‘Cover your heads!’ Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen, and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard the same man asking, ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer, ‘Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…’ That night, the soup tasted of corpses.’

Where is God when we suffer? 

This hard question prods us to look at the cross where Jesus is dead. And when we look at the cross, we cannot but ask, ‘Where was God when Jesus died on the cross?’ Did the good God allow Jesus to suffer? Do we not recall Jesus’ statement in Lk 23:31: ‘For if people do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?’ While reflecting on the suffering of Jesus, we are also reminded of the unjust human suffering. Moreover, we are disheartened when good people suffer and evil people thrive. The problem of theodicy makes us wonder where God is in all these.

Evil and Human Wickedness: More often than not, we like to blame God for the existence of evil without realizing our cooperation that facilitates its thriving. Also, evil is not an inexplicable phenomenon if we hold human wickedness accountable for its existence and thriving. At times, we conveniently overlook human responsibility for evil and question the silence of God over what in fact was wrought by our greed and selfishness. 

God’s Response to Evil: If the existence of evil can be partly explained by human wickedness, we should also reflect on God’s response to evil through the reality of the cross. For Christians, the cross symbolizes the depth and profundity of God’s love. Why? Because along with Jesus, it was God who was also suffering the death of his son. God was a fellow sufferer with Jesus on the cross, very much undergoing the pain and death of his son. In the same way He experienced the pain and death of Jesus on the cross, God is an anguished companion of those who unjustly suffer. It is because God has made Himself vulnerable for the love of humankind that the misinformed notions of God being vengeful or retributive are faulty and misleading. Because God identifies Himself with those who suffer, the silence of God does not mean His absence. Thus, when Jesus cried aloud, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ God was not an external agent who was passive and silent but someone who mingled himself with the pain and suffering of Jesus. 

And this suffering God is not passive or indifferent to our suffering. Rather, as someone who respects human freedom, He is actively engaged in stirring the hearts of good-willed people to build the counterculture to salvage the crisis situation. The God who made Himself vulnerable for His love toward humanity deeply believes in the inherent human goodness and works toward awakening it. God is not silent in the face of unjust human suffering but is actively committed to inspiring humans to respond to the crisis.

Such conceptual clarity regarding evil and God’s response helps us understand that we do not celebrate Good Friday to pay homage to Jesus, who died a horrific death. Nor is it to feel bad or guilty about the cross.

Instead, we draw valuable lessons from the cross. 

1. The cross helps us realize that the cost of love is so high. 

2. The sacrifice of Jesus reminds us that love is that which loses itself in loving. 

3. Jesus shows on the cross that true love is entering into someone’s chaos and making it ours. 

Reflecting on God’s vulnerable love, Moltmann said, ‘Cross is the reverse side of hope.’ Looking at the cross, we are called to build hope and not lose it because it is the cross that leads us to resurrection. It is because God grieved the death of his son, who redeemed the world on the cross, that Good Friday is Valentine’s Day for Christians. 

But how can we allow the reality of the cross to affect our everyday life? 

When Pope Francis visited a university in Manila on January 19, 2015, he was moved to tears when a girl, eyes welling up with tears, asked, ‘Many children get involved in drugs and prostitution. Why does God allow these things to happen to us? The children are not guilty of anything.’ The Pontiff then took the 12-year-old Glyzelle Palomar into his arms to comfort her. He was so touched by the girl’s appeal that he abandoned his written English script and started conversing spontaneously. 

The Good Friday shows that where we suffer because we love, God suffers in us. This is what we read in 1 Jn 4:16: ‘Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.’ Our tears would be sweet if we shed them for others. 

Let us pray that our experience of God’s love may transform us to gift the same to others. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar