TRANSCRIPT:
Happy Good Friday afternoon. I’m sure, like all of you, I’ve spent the afternoon involved with our liturgies and spiritual reading, looking at all of the meditations that we’ve got, all the information that we have to allow us to make this day special.
My insight today was really profound for me. You know, you read the same stuff over and over again every year, if you’re a cradle Catholic like I am, probably for forty years now. And so you’ve heard these stories, you see these things, but something really jumped out at me today that I wanted to share with you.
We all know how we got in this mess to begin with. It started in the Garden, and Adam and Eve were tempted by the devil, they violated God’s law, and they did so by taking something down off the tree and consuming it. And this was their path to death and the path to original sin for all of us.
How extraordinary it is, then, that God has deemed to bring about our salvation by taking Himself and putting Himself back up on the tree. Just like Adam and Eve took something off the tree and it was death, our Lord has put himself on the tree for our life. And of course, just like they were partaking of a forbidden fruit and they consumed it, our Lord has inverted that and made it good, and we partake of something- His body, His blood- which would normally be forbidden, right? But He has made it available voluntarily as a sacrifice, and we consume that.
So these are the remarkable parallels, these extraordinary echoes and rhymes that our Lord has given us, and also, it’s a complete circle. It’s a full satisfaction for the wrong that they did in a way that anybody can understand. Even a simpleton who would not get all the high theology could look at this parallel, look how it’s come full circle and made everything right.
It’s really extraordinary for me; I hope it’s beneficial for you to think about it that way, also. Take care.