When we peel away the outer, and even the inner, layers of our human experience, we are left, I believe, with two core elements with which we must reckon: love and death.

The one we crave for; the other we crave against.

Yet both are inextricably intertwined.

Both have multiple meanings, different degrees and very varied applications.

The love of one’s work is not the love of one’s son; the love of the fatherland is not the love of one’s mother; and the love of one’s mother is not the love of one’s son.

The death of a loved one is not death to an addiction; death to sin is not normally death to this physical life.

Our human experience, with its vast array of light and shade, joy and sadness, is surely beautiful. But whatever that experience may be for each one of us here today, it will ultimately have no meaning at all unless we come to terms with love and death.

They are the litmus test of our humanity.

And since love and death have so many meanings, the question is with which love and with which death must we come to terms?

What is that love without which all other loves mean nothing?

What is that death without which all other deaths end in utter oblivion?

A priest friend said to me just today, “people love Good Friday!” That remark answers my questions about love and death.

For even if someone should be here today only because of superstition, it too, despite itself, is rooted in something much deeper. Superstition emerges from a primeval intuition which seeks well-being.

I put it to you, however, with Christian hope that the reason “people love Good Friday”, the reason each one of us is here today, is because we just know that the love and death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, constitute the core meaning of all human life.

We just know that there is something ultimate about the Cross, and that somehow every human person must, one way or another, define him or her self by reference to that Cross.

As long as people still have that intuitive knowledge about the Cross, there is always hope for them, no matter how tragically sin may be devastating their lives.

In Jesus, love and death merge into one: he dies because he loves and he loves because he dies.

Since his love is so total, so pure, so divest of self, then his death too is somehow so total, so pure and so selflessly authentic.

No one can seriously hear the Passion of Jesus according to St. John without realizing that Jesus gives himself so consciously, so self-assuredly, so freely to death.

His words at the last supper explain what he is doing in his passion and give him strength throughout it: “this is my body, given for you; this is my blood poured out for you, for the forgiveness of your sins.”

For us! For the forgiveness of our sins, he willingly endures, indeed he longs to endure, the bitterness of his suffering and death. That bitterness is nothing in comparison with the sweetness of his love for us.

In the face of pure love, death is pure nothing.

 We die because we sin. Jesus dies because he loves ... the sinner, every sinner, in this church this evening and in this world every evening of every day that ever shall be.

And because he dies out of the freedom of his love, and not from the necessity of sin, as do we, Jesus transforms death.

Now, death for us too need no longer be the fearful sentence and revenge of Satan who hates us.

Jesus makes it possible also for us to die because we love.

But not with any love; not with those so-called “loves” which are nothing but selfishness or fanaticism.

No, not any love, but only and ever the love of Jesus. That love we cannot imitate by our own volition or power. We must first receive it as a gift, as the gift of his death.

To receive that gift, we must first believe in Him, believe in his love, believe in his death out of love for each one of us personally.

By his death he gives us the breath of his own life, so that we might no longer breathe with our own breath but with his; so that we may no longer die with our own breath, but with the breath of Jesus.

In other words, Jesus gives us his Holy Spirit that we might love no longer with the beautiful, but so imperfect, love of human mortality and sinfulness, but with the perfect love of the immortal and immaculate one.

Then, we too will really know how to love, and to die, as did the martyrs of old and of new.

In Jesus, love and death merge into one, but the result of that merger is a new reality.

Just as hydrogen and oxygen, when merged, become water, so love and death in Jesus become life, a life without death, a life whose substance and breath are constituted by the all-embracing and all-pervasive love of God.

Immortality for us is the fruit of his loving death and of his dying love for us.

 If we truly believe that this is the core truth of our existence (truly believe means not just a theoretical recognition, nor an abstract concept, but as constitutive of our very self-awareness, impacting on our life, transforming who we are, and how we are who we are, and guiding our choices and relationships), then our death will be nothing less than the fulfillment in us of immortal life.

Our death will be our birth into the full manifestation of the love of Jesus and of all else who have died in his love.

Jesus’ death for us is not some unfortunate consequence of his audacious teaching.

It is not a mere example of someone accepting the consequences of his opinions.

He is not just some hero to be admired alongside Ghandi or Nelson Mandela or some other such figure.

 The death of Jesus is more radical than the act of creation itself: it is a completely new beginning for humanity.

It changes the very nature of death: from being something to be feared and “craved against”, it becomes a gift given by Jesus (when our time comes).

In it we can express and gather together the harvest of love we have sown throughout our life and offer it all, together with our very selves, to him.

The arms of Jesus were stretched out on the Cross as a symbol of the total vulnerability of his self-giving love and of his readiness to embrace all who come to him. In a similar way, because Jesus transformed the meaning of death from the inside, our death is the moment in which we open our arms to Christ that he might embrace us into eternity.

My friends, we should therefore be ashamed of ourselves if we are ashamed of the Crucifix!

But if we say we love the Crucifix, sign ourselves with it, kiss it or otherwise venerate it, yet fail to conform our lives to the love and death it signifies, we should be even more ashamed.

If there is a so-called “love” in our lives which cannot be reconciled with the Crucifix, and still we seek to bless ourselves with it, we are in reality cursing ourselves.

The Crucifix does not stand to bless our self-concern and self-deceiving loves and any old thing we decide to be or do.

Rather, the Crucifix, precisely because it embodies the forgiveness of sins, judges everything we are and do so that we might repent and re-conform ourselves, our choices, our lifestyles, our priorities, our loves to that same Crucifix.

The Crucifix stands as a mirror to every human being in which to see the core meaning of human life and the core meaning of the life of God who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us that we might have life in his name.

The Crucifix demands of us, and empowers us, to live the ultimate love in the immediate love, for the ultimate lives in the immediate and the measure of how we live the immediate is the measure of how we will, or will not, live the ultimate.

Paraphrasing St. John of the Cross, at the end of life, that is death, we will be judged on love – true love, the real thing, the love of Jesus in us, working through us to heal and transform the lives of those around us.

 All the rest, unless done and lived in Christ’s ultimate love, will mean nothing.

God is not fooled when we call self-indulgence “love”, self-righteousness “justice” and ideology “truth”; or when we call destruction “progress” and licentiousness “freedom.”

No such counterfeit currency will have any place in the treasure house of heaven.

The new heavens and the new earth will not be made of human achievements, still less of power, privilege or money.

It will be made of cruciform love, and if we do not now harness all our energies and priorities in order to love until death as Jesus loved until death, it will be Jesus himself who will say, “I tell you solemnly, I do not know you.”

On that day, the Cross of hope will be the Cross of judgment and there will be no appeal above it.

As we come forward, then, to venerate the Crucifix this evening, let us not venerate our own condemnation, but gaze with clear eyes into the mirror which that Crucifix is and say in our own simple way, with deep faith and broken hearts, words such as these:

O Crucified Jesus,

let me let your love possess me

that I may conform my whole life

to that love,

until I come to die

in that love,

and so come to immortal life

through that love,

wherein rests the hope and destiny of every soul

and of your beautiful creation itself.

Glory to you, O Crucified Lord,

the Holy,

the Immortal,

the Strong!

 Amen.

Msgr. Peter Magee

Good Friday, April 14th, 2006

Annunciation Parish, DC