Fr. Benedict Groeschel said that Good Friday, "…brings Christ's humanity POWERFULLY before us. Good Friday reveals the reality of His humanity in a mysterious way. The person who suffers these terrible things is God, a Divine person experiencing human death, the separation of body and soul. His body is placed in the tomb and the Church teaches that His human soul, united with the Divine Person, descends into the mysterious lower world. Before this separation of death, however, Jesus experiences the absolute depth of human suffering and degradation. Many saints tell us He drank the cup of evil to its bitterest dregs in order to make atonement for all the sins of the world."

Our first reading from Isaiah is a prophecy of the suffering Messiah. These words of God, uttered by the prophet, are very revealing. In the recent war in Iraq, the news media coined a phrase, and used it often enough for all of us to remember. The phrase is "SHOCK and AWE". Well, Isaiah spoke words that described another type of "shock and awe". God speaks of His Servant; a suffering servant, who shall startle many nations and because of Him, kings shall stand speechless. The nations will be in AWE of this Servant of the Lord. But they will also be shocked. Shocked at the images of one SO GREAT yet MARRED was His look beyond human semblance. The images Isaiah gives us are TRULY shocking.

He said this servant would bear OUR infirmities and endure OUR sufferings. HE would be STRICKEN, and SMITTEN and AFFLICTED. PIERCED and CRUSHED for OUR offenses and OUR sins. The Lord God would lay upon Him the GUILT of us ALL. Shocking images. And yet by HIS stripes, we would be HEALED. A seemingly contradiction that rouses our AWE. To meditate on the passion and death of Jesus the Christ is to come face to face with REAL "SHOCK and AWE".

Now, the song, "Were you there…", should really be titled, "We WERE there". Oh Yes, We WERE there; complicit in our own sins and the sins of the whole world. It was OUR sins LASHED at His back, that CROWNED Him with thorns, that SPAT on His face, that NAILED Him to the cross, and PIERCED His side. OH yes, we were ALL there. Our sins were chanting…CRUCIFY HIM…CRUCIFY HIM.

I want to take us back there now, nearly 2000 years ago, that WE may share that moment with our loving Savior. St. John tells us earlier in His Gospel that "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."

Please close your eyes for a short while and listen to what the Son of God, our Blessed Lord, endured for our salvation.

While praying in the Garden of Gethsemane He becomes engaged in a fierce battle. He wrestles with a problem so great that His sweat glands ooze with great drops of blood as if He were being strangled. The stress is so great that the very cellular integrity of His body is being compromised. The soldiers under Judas Iscariot’s direction seize Him and bring Him to Pilate's Judgment Hall. Pilot asks Him "Are you a king then?" Jesus answers softly, "You say I’m a king. To this end I was born that I should bear witness of the truth." Pilate inquisitively turns his head and sarcastically asks, "What is truth" and then walks out of the hall.

There, under Pilate's command, He is whipped with a device having a stout handle with several leather strips, each studded with two stones or metal tips. Older people watching know the lashes from a whip of this type could amputate a leg. The chest wall could be easily perforated. By the end of the whipping, His back lay open as a shredded mass of crimson tissue with long strips of torn skin laying at peculiar angles and dangling like red icicles dripping with blood. Raw tendons and muscle are exposed to the air and hang in the same way. The onlookers’ sin-hardened hearts are not perceiving that the very Son of God is before them, but the younger are more sensitive to the situation.

In no time, a new torture is devised after He is untied from the post that supported His body during this awful whipping. A robe is placed about His bleeding shoulders to declaim Him King. A branch of vine, used to bundle firewood, with two-inch thorns, twisted into a wreath, is placed on His head. One by one, the soldiers strike Him, spit on Him, or pull out hunks of Jesus' beard and ask Him to prophesy which of them hit Him; laughing and yelling in mockery, "Hail King!" This crown is driven deeply into His head with the rod they had previously placed in His hand to mock His deity. They make fun of Him again and call Him "The King of the Jews." The thorns open those ever flowing blood vessels in His head and in minutes His hair and beard are soaked with blood. The men mock and jeer at the Lamb of God, a bleeding, broken, beaten man, near shock from loss of blood.

It's now been over 24 hours since He's had any sleep. He's exhausted and His strength is failing. Though His mind is dulled by lack of sleep and His life is oozing from the many wounds, He still can hear the throng chant, "Crucify Him, Crucify Him." We were there!

A few short weeks before, this same man stood outside Jerusalem and wept for these people. He had said "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem......how often would I have gathered your children together even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you would not!" Now the very nation He loves is clamoring and yelling for His death. The purple robe is ripped from His back, tearing loose the coagulated blood that had soaked into it. He bleeds profusely from the re-opened wounds from His whipping.

The cross is extremely heavy, weighing approximately 110 lbs. Is it hard to imagine? We were there! The soldiers place the crossbeam on Jesus’ shoulders, and He starts on the short 650-yard march to Golgotha. But this former carpenter who was strong in His youth and manhood was so weakened by the loss of blood, punishment and lack of rest, that He could not make it. It seems a paradox that the creator of this universe should be prostrated on the cobble stones of His own creativity beneath a timber. Why did He endure this pain and torture for you and me? His physical energy is now nearly gone. A man standing nearby is conscripted by the soldiers to carry His cross. Simon of Cyrene removes the timber from the shoulders of Jesus. His body battered by the fall, His back burning as with fire, His head pounding with each heart beat, He is dragged to His feet and guided between two guards as He staggers and stumbles the rest of the way.

At Golgotha, Christ is placed on the cross. The executioner has a great deal of knowledge about the placement of the nails. If they are placed too close to the base of the fingers, a man's weight could rip his hand free of the nail. So, carefully but swiftly, the nail is placed at the base of the palm where the wrist joins the hand and driven into the crossbeam with a large hammer. The ringing of the hammer sends chilling echoes through the air. Waves of pain shoot through His nervous system.

The cross member, with our nailed Lord, is lifted into place on the upright, and Christ's body sags as the full torture effect of the nails is felt. Next, His feet are fixed to the upright. With His knees slightly flexed, the left foot is placed on top of the right and a single nail is driven through both feet. The pain is a constant see-saw from hands to feet and back to His hands. As He stiffens His legs to relieve the pain in His hands, the agony in His feet builds till He pulls with His arms to relieve His feet. A constant motion of up and down, He moves trying to obtain some less painful position. The motion is causing His back to be torn more and bleed profusely as if a faucet of blood had been opened.

As the muscles in His arms and legs fatigue, the shock deepens and the agony increases. A new pain begins. Deep within His chest, a crushing, vise-like feeling begins to mount as His heart starts to fail. His breathing becomes very short and labored. His body no longer looks like a human being, and each breath is a gasp. It is with great effort that He stiffens His legs and draws in enough breath to utter those last cries, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Disillusioned friends watch their hope die, a leader disgraced, a Savior killed, a Lord destroyed. A mother watches her son die. With writhing pain in His eyes, He looks at His mother and forces the words, "Woman, behold thy son!" and then looks toward His beloved friend standing with Mary His mother and says, "Behold thy mother!"

The soldiers watch and wonder about this prisoner as His execution progresses. But as the whole world watches, the very God of Heaven, Christ's own Father, cannot watch, for He cannot look on sin. God the Father turns His back on His only begotten Son and we hear Jesus cry, "My God! My God! Why have You forsaken me?!"

The sun in the sky grows dim, clouds roll into place obscuring from God's eyes this horror on Golgotha's Hill. Christ looks quiet now, but wait, He moves. With the forces of sin heavy on His raw shoulders, the guilt of mankind on His back, the pain of disobedient children in His hands, the poker of hell burning in His feet and the broken heart of rejection by God and man struggling within His chest, He forces His legs to lift Him one last time. He raises His head and sucks in that last breath and looks up into the darkened sky and whispers, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." Then in a silent pause He lifts all of His weight upon His nailed feet and cries triumphantly "It is finished!!" The Son of God dies with the world’s sins in His mangled body.

That, my brothers and sisters, is "SHOCK and AWE": that the Son of God would endure all that for us. We know from the rest of scripture that Jesus was raised triumphantly from the dead just as He had prophesied. The world was radically saved through His once for all sacrifice, and the potential for eternal salvation was extended to EVERY human being. In the Divine Providence of God, His love is extended to each person, and in a most personal way to those of us who try to be His disciples. But this is an Easter message. Let us not rush to Easter quite yet. For now and until the Easter Vigil, let us ponder the passion and the CROSS and take to heart ALL that happened: for we were there! Let us recognize our sins in the lashes, the thorns, the nails, the spear and the Cross itself. Let us ponder the weight of our own sins laid upon the God-Man Jesus Christ. And let us ask for forgiveness and mercy.

May the Holy Spirit fill us with the desire and grace to do good, resist temptation and avoid sinful actions. For as St. Paul tells us, "… the grace of God has appeared, saving all and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good." [Titus 2:11-14]