Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025
To watch a video of this word, please click below:
To listen to an audio recording of the homily based on this word, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- An ecclesiastical holy year is meant to influence everything the Church does during that year. The Jubilee of Hope that we are now four months into — the first in Church history — is meant to make this Sacred Triduum, this Good Friday, these meditations on the seven last words of Christ from the Cross different from every Triduum, every Good Friday, every Tre Ore or “three hours” that has ever taken place.
- I’m therefore so grateful to Cardinal Dolan for his invitation to enter with you into the mystery of the Cross as our only hope. It’s not only one of the great and most humbling honors of my priestly life, but is particularly special because of Cardinal Dolan’s presence. During my years as a seminarian under him at the North American College in the Vatican, I was routinely lit on fire by his extraordinary charism for preaching, which he put on display not just in homilies but in 45 minute masterpieces of rectors conferences that regularly changed me for the better and filled me with a desire to be able to do for others what he in his preaching was doing for God in me. And so I hope today, here, to be able to give at least a little of the interest accrued over the last three decades from the treasure with which he enriched us as young men. I likewise heartily Fr. Enrique Salvo, the rector of this awesome Cathedral, for his welcoming us all here for prayer in America’s parish Church.
- There is a special connection between the virtue of hope we celebrate in this Jubilee and Good Friday.
- If you go to the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome, built over the remains of the former Saul of Tarsus, you’ll see an incredibly beautiful façade made out of mosaic. At the very top of the façade reaching into the heavens is a bejeweled Cross underneath which are the words Spes Unica, our only hope. It’s meant to summarize Saint Paul’s faith and preaching, which found their exclamation point in St. Paul’s martyrdom in Rome. St. Paul resolve to know and preach nothing except Christ and Christ crucified. He wanted to boast in nothing but the Cross of Christ, by which the world was crucified to him and him to the world. He told the Galatians that he had been crucified with Christ and the life he now lived in the flesh he lived by faith in the Son of God who loved him personally and gave his life for him on the Cross. And he told the Corinthians that even though Christ’s death on the Cross was a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles, Christians grasp that the Cross is not just the sign but the means of the power and the wisdom of God.
- Those words, Spes Unica, come from one of the most famous Lenten hymns of all time, the Vexilla Regis Prodeunt, written by Saint Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth century Bishop of Poitiers, France. It was originally sung before the procession of a relic of the true Cross of Christ on pilgrimage to Poitiers in the year 569. The hymn is now sung in the liturgy of the hours every night at Vespers from the vigil of Palm Sunday through Holy Thursday, on Good Friday, and on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. It likewise is sung every day in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, enshrining Calvary, in Jerusalem. The fifth verse of the hymn goes, Ave, O Crux, Spes Unica. “Hail, O Cross, Our Only Hope.” It proclaims the Church’s faith, something that’s crucial for us to ponder during this Jubilee, that the Cross is our only hope.
- Taken at face value, calling the Cross our spes unica seems ridiculous. If we view the Cross only or principally as an instrument or torture, public humiliation, and ignominious execution, such an expression is contrary to all common sense. We would never sing, “Hail O Electric Chair!” or
“Hail, O guillotine,” or “Hail, O Firing Squad!,” or call a noose or a lethal injection “our only hope.” But for Christians, as St. Paul saw, the Cross is not fundamentally a sign and instrument of suffering and death but of the love that makes even that much suffering bearable. The Cross is a reminder ultimately of the Lover who loves even to death, death on a Cross. - That’s the first reason why the Cross is a sign of hope, indeed our only hope, because it was on the Cross that we see just how much God loved the world that he sent his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. It is on the Cross that we behold that God did not even spare his own Son but handed him over for us all and, if he would do that, then, as St. Paul reflected, wouldn’t he give us everything else besides? That’s why Pope Francis, in his introductory letter for this Jubilee entitled it Spes non confundit, hope does not disappoint, because, as St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans, “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” and poured that love “into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” The Cross is our only hope because, as Jesus said, when he is lifted up on the Cross, he promised to draw all things to himself. Like the bronze serpent in the desert that cured the snake-bitten Israelites of the lethal serpentine venom, so Christ, lifted up, would become the antidote to all of the ways the ancient serpent of Eden would seek to poison us through sin. That’s the first way the Cross is our only hope.
- The second way is by helping us to die to ourselves so that we can unite ourselves fully to Christ. Several times in the Gospel Jesus told us that to be his disciple we have to deny ourselves, pick up our cross each day and follow him. The Cross is the means by which we liberate ourselves from our egocentrism, from our softness, from our worldliness so that, like Simon of Cyrene, we can unite ourselves fully to Jesus. We need the Cross to experience to experience the newness of life Jesus came into the world to give us so that we might have life to the full. We embrace this truth every time we come into Church, except during the Sacred Triduum, to highlight this reality even more. We dip our finger into the Holy Water stoup, which is a reminder of our baptism, when we were baptized into his death and resurrection. We then take the holy water and make a sign of the Cross over us, a recognition that we recognize that we are called by Christ to pick up our Cross every day, and by means of the Cross die to everything that keeps us from Jesus so that we might be free to experience the Resurrection and Life he gives. We can’t do it on our own. We need God’s help. And that help is the Cross. That’s the second reason why the Cross is our only hope, because it liberates us to cling to Jesus with all our mind, heart, soul and strength.
- We’re living in a day, however, surrounded by so many creature comforts in a consumerist and materialistic culture, in which many are tempted, just like Jesus’ first followers, to reject the Cross and run away from it. We don’t want to confront his suffering or ours. Like Simon Peter, moments after he confessed Jesus to be the Messiah and Son of the Living God and Christ changed his name to “rock,” when Jesus spoke to the apostles about his upcoming betrayal and crucifixion, want to cry out, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing should ever happen to you!” Similarly like all of Jesus’ first disciples, when Jesus describes that we take up our Cross each day too and embrace with love whatever sufferings the Lord may ask us to endure, we want to change the subject. But the greatest witness of hope in the world is the trust in God that is shown in suffering. That even if we walk in the valley of darkness, we fear no evil, because we believe that Christ is with us with his rod and staff, ultimately with his Cross, to give us comfort.
- If St. Paul told the first Christians in Ephesus that before the Gospel was brought to them, they were living without hope because they were living without God in the world, that means that hope, essentially, is living with God in the world. Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us has entered human existence to be with us — and he’s still with us. No matter what we may endure, he wants to help us to unite everything to him. Just as his betrayal, torture and death were all preludes to the resurrection, he wants to convert even the most difficult of human experiences into occasions of love leading to eternal life. St. Paul would tell his spiritual son, St. Timothy, that Christ is our hope. Today we grasp that Christ crucified is our hope, which is why, even when he rises from the dead, he still bears the scars of his crucifixion. The eternal life for which we long will likewise have us bear the marks of our own crucifixion and death in Christ.
- Someone who grasped this was the patron of this famous Cathedral and of this Archdiocese. St. Patrick suffered so much as a slave for six years in Ireland as a boy and young man. He suffered much from the opposition he endured when he returned as a priest and bishop to bring the Gospel to the people who had enslaved him. But he was able to bring the Irish hope because he was helping them to unite all aspects of life, including its sufferings, to God. He began every day with a prayer he had written and eventually had put on a breastplate he would wear under his garments, “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in the eye that sees me, Christ in the ear that hears me.” That Christ crucified and risen wants to envelop us, too, and St. Patrick, looking at us on the column opposite this pulpit, is praying for us to cooperate fully with that metamorphosis.
- In these meditations on Christ’s seven last words, given to us through literally excruciating pain from the pulpit of Golgotha, I would like, with the crucifix behind me, to ponder how each of these seven expressions is a message of great hope to us, a hope that Jesus wants each of us to receive, be thoroughly transformed by, and herald to others. For each of the words, I would like to highlight how certain saints have been so changed by the hope contained in each word, and in Jesus’ silent body language, that they have become missionaries bringing that Christian hope to others. St. Peter called all of us always to be ready to give an explanation of the reason of our hope to anyone who asks. Today Jesus wants us to recognize what that ultimate reason is. It’s the cruciform love he shows us on Calvary. That’s why, together with Christians over the last 1455 years, we exclaim, Ave, O Crux, Spes Unica, and draw near in veneration.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download