Good Friday: Behold a new relationship

Woman, behold your son; (to the beloved disciple) behold your mother.

A copy of Michelangelo’s pieta sits on my desk, or during these days of isolation on my home altar. I gaze at it every day. It is for me an icon, a image not itself holy but which transports the gazer to a holy moment, a holy mother, the holy son, the holiness of grief held in absolute love.

And on Good Friday laid alongside one of the seven last words of Jesus, its flat photographic quality becomes enlivened as though real or at least 3 dimensional.

Woman, behold your son; Son, behold your mother.

I don’t know about you but I wasn’t sure Good Friday would actually feel any different than the last 21days. I wasn’t sure that the grief and loss felt already through COVID 19 and its consequences would allow anything like the appropriate devotion and reverence usually called for at the cross, in the litany, by the prayers.

I was wrong. 

If Lent is intended to open us and empty us that we might fully experience sorrow and love flowing mingled down before all love is raised up and tears wiped away, then I am guessing we are all pretty empty right now, hollowed out, dry like the bones. 

Is there anything left for Good Friday? 

There is / if we focus on the Word. 

Imagine Jesus is speaking to you. Woman (or man) behold your son; Son behold your mother (father). We are all gathered spiritually at the foot of the cross. Stay there a moment. 

No more, you say. Too hard, you say. I would gently urge you to remain. To feel the love surging through the pain. 

When I gaze at the pieta, I feel such sorrow / and / I feel incredible love.

I derive some sense of capacity for all this in the invitation by Jesus to behold...as though being spoken to all beloveds whom he beheld.

BY one count, the word Behold is used over 1298 times in the Bible! 1298! By another over 5000! Whatever the count, it is clearly an important word.

Why not look or see? perhaps it is because behold connotes what it sounds like: not just seeing or noticing, but holding the gaze. It comes closer to apprehending or perceiving entirely. In old English, bihalden, it means to hold thoroughly. It calls us to new attention!

It is a special important word used it seems when God wants us to take in with all our senses a holy scene or divine Word. Behold the Lamb of God. Behold I give you a new commandment. Behold, I make all things new.

And so at the cross when to behold is so very painful and we would rather just glance if at all, Jesus invites us to behold the meaning to be derived from this moment. Jesus tells us to behold the love forming new familial loving caring relationships. Jesus tells us to behold the icon, his mother and the beloved disciple, of the beloved community which lives on in His Name. 

So much has been taken away in these last days

So much loss, grief, sorrow, comfort

hugs, kisses, handshakes, closeness

What has not been taken away is beholding, even if we would rather not...

We are called just as at the cross to behold a world crucified, a world with us and God in it. We are called to behold each other and to be beheld. We are called to love in that beholding. We are called to be the beheld beloved community.

I was struck by the quote by Somerville which seemed to be speaking to me, to us, trying to locate where to be on this displaced Good Friday:

“Maybe this is where we need to enter the Good Friday drama, and maybe this is where we need to take our stand: not betraying Jesus, not denying him, not judging him,not condemning him, not rejecting him, not mocking him, not cursing him, not flogging him, not killing him - but standing there at the foot of the cross with others who love him, and putting our arms around each other for comfort and strength, so that when they ask us later what happened we can say ‘I was standing at the foot of the cross..’.”

Today for many of us we enter the Good Friday scene in locations different from years past and unable to “put our arms around each other” actually. But we are able to do so spiritually and intentionally. We are able to show up somehow and it will be enough.

Just as Jesus offered or invited his mother and beloved disciple to a new relationship which would contain or embody love for each other and of God, So are we invited to leave this cross and behold a new community. So are we invited to be-held in that communion. 

Stay, remain, behold at the cross of Jesus have become the stanzas for ironic movement to Easter, the Paschal Mystery, new life!

May you have today this incredible experience of knowing love through excruciating pain. May you know you are beheld and beloved by God. May you in turn behold one another and love each other into the Resurrection!