Death on a Friday Afternoon

Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross by Richard John Neuhaus

In recent days it has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to outrun or outspend reality. War and its tragedies will not cease. Tremendous natural disasters tear apart whole cities and countries, leaving the poor destitute and exposing a terrifying range of human depravities. What better time to consider Good Friday? When our own prayers cannot find utterance, what better day to think about the last seven words of Jesus from the cross: 

1. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
2. Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.
3. Woman, behold your son. Son behold your mother.
4. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
5. I thirst.
6. It is finished.
7. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.

Fr. Neuhaus’s exploration into the meaning of these words – and thereby the meaning of suffering, justice, loss, death, and hope – is unique in that he probes the dark side of human experience while steadily illuminating it with the promise of life. If the cross is “the center upon which the cosmos turns,” “if everything is mysteriously entangled with what happened, with what happens, in these days,” it behooves us to listen to the words of a dying man and to (in Neuhaus’s words) “stay a while with that dying.” How else will we know Good Friday to be “the drama of the love by which our every day is sustained”?

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