Revelation 1:17-18
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one; I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.
Friday is traditionally associated with death in the Christian tradition, for obvious reasons. Jesus died today. And so, for equally obvious reasons, Christians have, for centuries, made some act of identification with that Death by acts of self-denial like fasting, abstinence or some other form of penance. We do this, not to add something to what Jesus has done but to enter into what he has done. And we involve our bodies via fasting and such, not because we are unspiritual but because Jesus, the most spiritual One of all, is physical: the Word became flesh. Indeed, it is only because he became flesh that we could be saved by him at all, because he came to offer that flesh up to death. For death is not just a “spiritual” mystery. It is an intractably physical mystery too. The fruit of death is the obscenity of a corpse and a ghost ripped apart into a division that should not be. The fruit of Christ’s sacrifice is a Risen Human Being in which body, soul and spirit have been, not only reunited, but glorified. And so, once again this Friday, we will fast or abstain or do some small act of self-denial for his sake: that we might, as T.S. Eliot said, die before we die. Today, enter into the Paschal Mystery bodily in some way and ask God to bring his glory out of it for your good and the good of all his Church.
