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Friday, March 29, 2013
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Good Friday
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Isaiah
52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25 or Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John
18:1-19:42
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John
19:30
The above verse took on new
meaning for me during Holy Week of 2009 while my mother was dying. The words of
Jesus as he hung on the cross were never more striking.
Good Friday doesn’t fall on the
same date every year. But since 2009, I have looked at Good Friday quite
differently. My mother died on Good
Friday, April 10, 2009. It was a
cataclysmic event for me. We hadn’t had a major death in our family for
decades. My father died more than 50 years ago and we had lost grandparents,
uncles and aunts--but never anyone this close in many years.
Though it has been four years since
her death, the haunting memory of that scene in the hospital room is as vivid
as if it were today. I wasn't prepared
for the breakdown I had when I saw the lifeless body of my mother lying in the
hospital bed at Columbus Riverside Hospital. The strength that had sustained me
during the ordeal of the preceding months, as we watched her decline, abandoned
me at that moment and I cried like a baby. Though I had told myself I had no
regrets, I longed desperately to talk to her one more time. I touched her
cheeks and embraced her innocent-looking face as the tears gushed and my heart
broke. The thought of her not being with us anymore was just too much to take.
It is a feeling I don't think I'll ever experience ever again or want to.
But as I think back to that day,
my sense of loss has been filled with hope. Each Good Friday, we are drawn to
the scene of Mary watching her son hanging on the cross, his life slipping
away. Anyone who has watched a loved one die can relate to her grief. But what Mary didn’t know at the time was
that in a matter of three days that grief would be replaced by the
inexpressible joy of the Resurrection and the world would be endowed with the
gift of salvation for all who believe in God’s son.
Because of that first Good
Friday, we can now gather at the foot of the cross each subsequent Good Friday,
not to grieve, but to strengthen and renew our faith. It was that cruel death that proved God’s
undying love for us. And for that we say, “Thanks be to God!”
Rev. Abraham D. Allende
