N.B. This is Part II of the 3-part Triduum Series. Part I can be found here.
Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion April 18, 2025
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
“By his stripes we were healed.” How strange to say the wounds, the “stripes” left by a whip could bring healing. Yet what God has written, he has written. Today, we continue our reflection on the healing power of the Paschal Mystery. Last night, at the Last Supper, we reflected on how it heals our community. Salvation is not a private thing, but the result of being incorporated into the communion of the Church, forgiving and being forgiven – washing one another’s feet as does for us.
The Eucharist ought to define our relationship with one another and open us to the reality that God wants to heal our community. As we’ll see, this healing also extends to body and soul. The healing of our bodies is the focus of tomorrow night, but today draws us into this mystery: “by his stripes we” – our souls – “were healed.”
How can the inexcusable and horrific torment of Jesus heal our souls? By grace. We are dealing with a mystery. Some aspects of this will always lie beyond our complete comprehension. We are not, however, left without anything to ponder and understand.
St. John invokes his status as an eyewitness to assure us that “immediately blood and water flowed out” when Jesus was pierced by a lance. The placement and flow of that blood and water is the literal, physiological response to being tortured and then pierced. The factual existence of blood and water from the heart of Jesus points us to the mystical realities of Baptism and the Eucharist. Baptism forgives all sins and heals our souls. The Eucharist forgives venial sins and heals our souls, granting them a strength greater than before.
At the same time, Jesus’ death on the cross makes suffering itself a path to healing. Anyone who has ever suffered can attest to the fact that suffering typically wounds our souls, leaving us jaded, cold, and afraid. So, how can suffering also heal them? Ah, the mystery of the cross! To grasp this takes a lifetime! More, really. Only in eternity will we fully understand. Still, there is somewhere to begin: the beginning, Genesis.
Our bodies and souls are disordered. When Adam & Eve sinned, they damaged human nature. Our souls should be in charge of our bodies and all that entails, but they usually aren’t. Like training a rebellious animal, reasserting the soul’s control over our bodies often entails some pain. So it is that pain heals us by restoring spiritual control.
The Cross of Christ goes even deeper than that. So much of our suffering is not useful and is itself spiritual. Prior to Original Sin, as our bodies obeyed our souls, so our souls were supposed to trust and obey God. Because Adam & Eve did not trust God even when God gave them good things, so we find ourselves in a trust deficit. We owe God our trust. Trusting him when things are good is good, but it’s too cheap to pay the trust deficit. Trusting God when we suffer, however? That’s a stronger investment. Ultimately, we cannot actually pay back the debt of trust by ourselves. It is the suffering of Jesus that pays our debt. He never doubted and so owed nothing, making his act of trust-in-the-midst-of-suffering infinitely valuable, able to pay that debt. What our suffering can do is train us to receive that gift. Suffering with trust can heal us of the wounds caused by suffering without trust.
It helps to think of it this way: Suffering wounds us in three ways. There is the pain itself, whether physical or spiritual. There is also the existential question, the way suffering makes us wonder, “what’s the point?” Finally, there is the isolation. Pain has a way of making us feel alone. The greater the pain, the harder it is to see outside ourselves. The Passion and death of Jesus enters into all three of these.
Suffering hurts, there’s no way around that. But pain has a purpose. It alerts us to danger. Suffering, all suffering is a wake-up call, a forceful reminder that we’re not meant for this world. By choosing to suffer like us, Jesus shows us that we should see any and all pain as a reminder that this world is broken. So, suffering can heal our souls by freeing them of the lie that we can be perfectly happy in this world.
As for the existential question, Jesus’ suffering gives an answer. If we accept it with faith, if we unite it to Jesus on the cross, any and all suffering can have a purpose. So, when our souls are wounded by the fear that everything is pointless, redemptive suffering heals them by saying “this pain is now a channel of grace for me and others.” Redemptive suffering heals our souls by giving them purpose.
Redemptive suffering also answers the loneliness caused by pain. Jesus is God and Man. When Jesus suffered as a man, his divinity “plugged in” to any and all human suffering to ever exist. What that means is those who suffer are no longer alone. When we turn our thoughts to Jesus’ suffering, we can become aware of the fact that Jesus feels our suffering in this very moment. You are never alone in your pain! All it takes is the faith and the willingness to see him with you.
“By his stripes we were healed.” By his stripes, our suffering can stop being a pointless, lonely denial of happiness and become a purposeful, communal expression of hope for even greater happiness. By his stripes, our suffering can begin to heal our souls of the wounds caused by suffering without his stripes. This is the difference between suffering that wounds the soul and suffering that heals it, the same difference between theft and gift. When something is stolen from us, we are grieved. When we choose to give that same thing away to one we love, we are filled with joy.
So much suffering in this world is unavoidable, inflicted on us unjustly. We can’t stop that. What we can do, though, is make the choice to accept it, to respond by making the suffering something we give freely to God. The devil and the world cannot take from us what we’ve already given away, which is why Pilate and others are baffled when Jesus does not defend himself or try to escape his torment. Suffering endured with resentful rejection will wound us. Suffering embraced with faith and in union with Christ will heal us, even if that embrace is imperfect and faltering. By his stripes we are healed. By his stripes, even our suffering can become joy until, eventually, the suffering will be no more.