Good Friday
R. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.
Written by Bill Donaghy
The Divine Descent into Darkness
This is the Day. This is the Day of all days. The Day that puts us in a daze. It's an unfathomable, incomprehensible, unimaginable day. Today, the God of Love - the Incarnate God Who is Love - plunges into the abyss. This is the day Saint Paul described when he said that Jesus “became sin for us.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) Imagine that! The Great God, the Unbreakable and Unforgettable Lord of Lords now says in the voice of today’s psalm, "I am forgotten like the unremembered dead; I am like a dish that is broken.”
We have to let this sink in. Really sink in! C.S. Lewis gives us a visual of what this Divine descent, this “salvific sinking” of the Incarnation and Redemption looks like: “Think what that descent is. The coming down, not only into humanity, but… going lower still into being a corpse… One has a picture of someone going right down and dredging the sea-bottom… one has the picture of a diver, stripping off garment after garment, making himself naked, then flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green and warm and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime…”
This is the image of the Savior, sinking into our sin, not afraid to become for us, as the psalm says, a “laughingstock” and a “dread” to all. And in this, when He Who sits at the right of the Father hits rock bottom, he commends His spirit. He entrusts Himself, He surrenders Himself entirely, and says to His Father “in your hands is my destiny.”
The call to us, for whom He has made this divine plunge, is to also commend ourselves, to entrust ourselves. To commend trustfully our spirits, our minds, our bodies, our sins, our brokenness, all of it! And when by His grace, we follow Him in the plunge to the depths of trust, He will take us up! C.S. Lewis continues, describing now the divine ascent of the Christ, “… then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get.” (The Grand Miracle, C.S. Lewis, April 15, 1945)
This is us! We are the thing dripping now with the Blood of Christ and the Water that flowed from his Sacred Heart. We are drenched in Divine Mercy! And on this Friday that the Church has the holy audacity to call “Good”, we can pray with the psalmist to the Lord, “Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your kindness…”
Bill is a senior lecturer for the Theology of the Body Institute as well as a Certification Program instructor, national and international speaker. He has developed “The Way of Beauty: Theology of the Body and Art” course for the TOB Institute and is presently building a new course on the “Sacramental Stories of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis” scheduled for 2023. Bill has worked in mission, evangelization, and education for nearly 25 years, with a background in visual arts, philosophy, and systematic theology. He has given talks and retreats to bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated men and women, and the lay faithful throughout the world. He taught for over 13 years as an adjunct professor for Immaculata University and presently as a theology teacher for Homeschool Connections, teaching live, interactive courses for middle and high school age students. Bill is the co-author with Chris Stefanick of the RISE: 30 Day Challenge for Men program and editor of the Strive21.com initiative with Matt Fradd. He and his wife, Rebecca, live just outside of Philadelphia, PA with their four children. Follow Bill on Instagram.
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Pray with today’s psalm.