holy week, good friday

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
By your cross O Lord, you show the extravagance of your love for us.  Love than knows no limits…no boundaries.  Love that pours down upon us from every wound of your beloved Son.  More love than we could ever ask for or imagine.  When we are tempted to doubt the depths of your heart for us, let our eyes immediately look to Jesus crucified—and may all doubt be taken away.  In His name.  Amen. (JLB)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 22

Scripture for the Day: Matthew 26:47-27:54

Reading for Reflection:

     In the winter of 1968-69, I lived in a cave in the mountains of the Zaragosa Desert in Spain.  For seven months I saw no one, never heard the sound of a human voice.  Hewn out of the face of the mountain, the cave towered 6,000 feet above sea level.  Each Sunday morning a brother from the village of Farlete below dropped off food, drinking water, and kerosene at the designated spot.  Within the cave a stone partition divided the chapel on the right from the living quarters on the left.  A stone slab covered with potato sacks served as a bed.  The other furniture was a rugged granite desk, a wooden chair, a sterno stove, and a kerosene lamp.  On the wall of the chapel hung a three-foot crucifix.  I awoke each morning at two A.M. and went in there for an hour of nocturnal adoration.

     On the night of December 13, during what began as a long and lonely hour of prayer, I heard in faith Jesus Christ say, “For love of you I left My Father’s side.  I came to you who ran from Me, fled Me, who did not want to hear My name.  For love of you I was covered with spit, punched, beaten, and affixed to the wood of the cross.”

     These words are burned on my life.  Whether I am in a state of grace or disgrace, elation or depression, that night of fire quietly burns on.  I looked at the crucifix for a long time, figuratively saw the blood streaming from every pore of His body and heard the cry of His wounds: “This isn’t a joke.  It is not a laughing matter to Me that I have loved you.”  The longer I looked the more I realized that no man has ever loved me and no one ever could love me as He did.  I went out of the cave and stood on the precipice, and shouted into the darkness, “Jesus, are you crazy?  Are You out of Your mind to have loved me so much?”  I learned that night what a wise old man had told me years earlier: “Only the one who has experienced it can know what the love of Jesus Christ is.  Once you have experienced it, nothing else in the world will seem more beautiful or desirable.”

     The Lord reveals Himself to each of us in myriad ways.  For me the human face of God is the strangulating Jesus stretched against a darkened sky, vulnerable to the taunts of passersby.  In another of his letters from prison, Bonhoeffer wrote, “This is the only God who counts.”  Christ on the cross is not a mere theological precondition for the achievement of salvation.  He is God’s enduring Word to the world saying, “See how much I love you.  See how much you must love one another.” (The Signature of Jesus by Brennan Manning)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Lift Up Thy Bleeding Hand


When wounded sore, the stricken heart
Lies bleeding and unbound,
One only hand, a pierced hand,
Can salve the sinner's wound.

When sorrow swells the laden breast,
And tears of anguish flow,
One only heart, a broken heart,
Can feel the sinner's woe.

Chorus:
Lift up Thy bleeding hand, O Lord,
Unseal that cleansing tide;
We have no shelter from our sin
But in Thy wounded side.

When penitential grief has wept
O'er some foul dark spot,
One only stream, a stream of blood,
Can wash away the blot.

'Tis Jesus' blood that washes white,
His hand that brings relief,
His heart that's touched with all our joys,
And feels for all our grief.
Chorus


Closing Prayer:

Our God and Father,

     We thank You that You have delivered us from the dominion of sin and death, and brought us into the kingdom of Your Son: Grant we pray that, by his death he has recalled us to life, so by his love he may raise us to eternal joy.  In the name of Jesus.  Amen. (adapted from Venite by Robert Benson)