Sermon by Father Alex McAllister SDS                   Index

Good Friday—2002      Homily

On this most solemn day of the year we keep the memory of the Death of our Lord Jesus Christ on the hill of Calvary.

We spend time in prayer and recollection and as we do so we recognise that the Saviour of the World gave his life for our sake, in reparation for our sins and selfishness.

We are confronted this afternoon with the death of an innocent man; but he was a man with a difference because he was the Son of God himself.

No one before or since could be less worthy of such a death. But as we have heard in this Gospel account Jesus gave his life willingly for he knew that it was only his sacrifice that would redeem the whole world.

We rejoice that we have so great a Saviour and yet we are saddened that it had to come to this. And we repent with our whole hearts for having been the cause, even if only in some small part, of the suffering and death of Jesus our loving Saviour.

However, on our part we have kept faith with him because during these weeks of Lent we have repented of our sins and because in this ceremony we have followed him on the Way of the Cross.

We have identified with his sufferings and have all of us performed acts of penance, even if only small ones, in order to show our love for our Divine Saviour.

These things have real value however minor they seem. Our small penances have a real connection to and identification with Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Unlike the crowds we did not jeer or demand his death, unlike the soldiers we did not scourge him, unlike the executioners we did not bang in the nails.

We are his disciples and what we have done is necessarily different. What we have done during Lent is to carry the mark of ashes on our foreheads, to repent of our sins, to perform penances in reparation for our transgressions, and during these six weeks to have deeply meditated on the suffering and death of our Saviour.

We have walked where he has walked, and we will die as he has died but most surely of all we will rise just as he rose.