Tomorrow is the day we remember that the Lord of all Life gave up His life that we might live. He paid our debt to eternity with His own blood and humiliation, by suffering an ignoble and scandalous death and consenting to suffer and die while wholly human, wholly alone and separated from God for our sins.
He felt it all, knew it all, endured it all. For us.
There is no humiliation we have known that He did not experience. He suffered to the limits of human suffering and was shamed to the limits that human beings can shame another person. He was, for those hours, the plaything of satan, the object of satan’s ravening hunger for revenge on the God Who cast him out from heaven.
He did this for love of us. Of you.
He is with us now and forever, beside us as we face the perils of our present hour. He stands beside the grocery clerk, sits in the next seat with the truck driver, guides the hands of the physician, the nurse, and the lab tech.
There is no terror of sickness, death and suffering we feel that He has not felt. Our fears of an impoverishing economic depression are familiar to a carpenter’s son who grew up in a conquered nation. He knows everything we feel because He has felt it.
The first Good Friday was a horrible day. The only good in it is that we are healed by his suffering, freed from the just penalty of our sins because He paid the fine for us with His blood.
Now is the time for us to turn to Him in prayer and fasting, to ask Him to send St Michael the Archangel to cast out the demons of plague and human incompetence that threaten us.
Lay down the fork and take up the Rosary. Stop pacing in terror and kneel before the Cross.
Ask Him for the gift of His wisdom that we might let this experience teach us the lessons He wants us to learn. Ask for the peace that passes all understanding so that we can lie down in peace at night and sleep. Ask Him for the gift of love for other people so that we can be His hands, feet and love in this time of peril and suffering.
Trust Him.
Give Him your life, put it in His hands and know that it is forever safe.
Then do your part to end this virus. Stay home, if that is your part. Go to work, if that is your part. Love those you are called to love and give freely of what you have to those who need it.
Pray that we will come out of this crisis with renewed faith and commitment to the common good and doing His will on this earth while we are here. Know that heaven awaits us when we have run our race.
Give tomorrow to fasting and prayer. Be with Him in His Hour. Remember His suffering and lift up the suffering of all those who are afflicted by this plague to Him and His mercy.
Pray that He will send His angels to care for us and do battle with the virus for us. Pray that we will not “return to normal,” but that this time of suffering will bring about a new normal, a renewal of faith and conversion for all of us. Pray that we will allow this experience to teach us what God wants us to learn from it; to mold us and shape us into His true servants.
Trust God.
Turn to Him in fasting and prayer that we will rise up from this on the wings of eagles and that everyone, everywhere, from pole to pole and dateline to dateline, will call Him Lord.
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