Good Friday

Good Friday 2011 “It is finished”
As Jesus dies on the cross he declares “It is finished.”

What is finished is what the co-eternal Beloved came to Earth to accomplish. The Beloved united his divinity with our humanity in Jesus Christ in order to rescue us from the choice we made as a species to separate from God.

As religious people we are so familiar with the story of that original choice that we tend to lose sight of how that choice formed our species and continues to form each of us.

The Original Choice to separate from God was and is the choice to reject God’s offer of a personal relationship with the Beloved. The choice to separate is the assertion of free will to demand equality with God according to two of God’s many attributes. It is also the choice to reject God’s own description of his essential nature.

The attributes of God our species chose to demand are knowledge and power. The essential nature of God that we rejected are love and holiness.

Original Separation creates original pain. It is a deeply seated pervasive existential pain that we live with all of our lives. It is a pain that creates terrible distortions in the way we think, feel and make choices. It is pain we seek to hide from in the various pleasures and distractions and fatal addictions our culture offers us.

As we seek to hide from the truth of this pain we seek to hide from God. We become lost in the distortions. Those distortions produce a corruption of the many virtues God designed for us to live by and to enjoy. That corruption of virtue is what the Church calls “actual sin”. Finally, the ultimate consequence of Original Separation is death.

This death is two fold. There is the spiritual death at work in our souls. And, there is the physical death that destroys our bodies.
The great problem that confronts and defines the human race is that as a species we have separated from God and are now lost. Not only are we lost we do not want to be found.

The process of death at work in a lost soul manifests in the will to power. The will to power uses people and loves things. The will to power demands of all other people, the natural world and God Himself: my will be done. Do it my way. I want what I want and I want it now.

The will to power is the exaltation of pride that leads to despair.
When our species made this original choice to separate from God, God immediately devised a plan to rescue us from that choice.

The rescue operation is the plan of salvation. The plan of salvation holds no condemnation. The Plan of Salvation preserves God’s original plan for our species to be the immortal beloved of The co-eternal Beloved.

Jesus Christ just doesn’t teach about the plan of salvation, he is the Plan of Salvation.

In Jesus, The Beloved second person of the Trinity unites his divinity with our humanity. In that union, Jesus reunites humanity with divinity in his own person. Jesus is the Father’s Plan of Salvation because Jesus is the second Adam. Jesus is the new way of being human that was God’s original plan for humanity.

Jesus knew people would reject him and kill him. In his humanity he asked if there were any other way to accomplish the Plan of Salvation. There wasn’t. There isn’t. Because the Plan of Salvation is not a religion it is the person of Jesus Christ himself.

As humanity tortured and killed Jesus to preserve our separation from God, Jesus took our will to power into himself, felt the fullness of our sin and death, then transformed it back into love and life through the essential nature of his own eternal love and eternal life.

Jesus said: it is finished as he died on the cross. He said this because he had allowed humanity to do its worst to him. He suffered the worst we could offer and the worst we ourselves could experience. He endured the Original Pain of Original Separation so he could trap it in his own body and soul and by the power of Divine love and holiness transform it back into love.

Salvation is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the reason God the Father created our species. Jesus Christ is The Beloved of the Father who now reaches out to all people everywhere with the invitation for each of us and all of us to become the beloved of the Beloved.

As our origin is in Divine Love so the new life Jesus offers us is in Divine love. There is no condemnation in that love. There is only the compassion of Jesus Christ offering us a completed and perfected work he himself accomplished on the cross.
Jesus said: it is finished. He now offers us that completed work of salvation as a free gift. The free gift is a new life in union with the Father through the Son. The free gift is a new way of living in the personal Presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.