You Are Not That Man’s Disciple, Are You?, Good Friday, March 29, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Manhattan
Commemoration of the Lord’s Passion
Good Friday 2024
March 29, 2024
Is 52:13-53:12, Ps 31, Heb 4:14-16.5:7-9, Jn 18:1-19:42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today on Good Friday we ponder all that Jesus out of love for us suffered in order to save us. It’s difficult for us behold him, as Isaiah prophesied in today’s first reading, “marred … beyond human semblance,” with “no stately bearing to make us look at him,” “spurned and avoided,” “a man of suffering … from whom people hide their faces,” “held in no esteem,” “pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins,” “harshly treated,” “like a lamb led to the slaughter,” “oppressed and condemned,” “cut off,” and “smitten.” It’s painful for us to ponder him who loves us so, with the predictive words of today’s Psalm, as “an object of reproach,” a “laughingstock,” a “dread to [his] friends,” “like a dish that is broken.” It’s excruciating to actualize the Gospel as we see him betrayed by Judas, abandoned by the apostles, seized, bound, dragged, spat upon and struck repeatedly by the soldiers, interrogated in bad faith by the chief priests, the Sanhedrin, Pontius Pilate and Herod, unpreferred even to Barabbas, scourged, crowned with thorns, scorned by the mob that clamored for his crucifixion, stripped naked, hammered to the Cross, mocked by the thieves, passersby and the chief priests, dehydrated to the point of dessication, and finally dead.
• John says that after Jesus’ unbeating heart was pierced by a soldier’s lance and a torrent of blood and water flowed out, it happened so that “they [would] look upon him whom they have pierced.” It’s agonizing to ponder Jesus like this, even though the prophets and psalms predicted that this would always be the fate of the Messiah. It’s grievous even though Isaiah in today’s prophecy stated that “the will of the Lord shall be accomplished through him,” that “by his stripes we [would be] healed,” that “through his suffering, [he would] justify many,” that “he [would] take away the sins of many and win pardon for their offenses” and that he would receive “a portion among the great.” It’s terrible even though Jesus himself three times in the Gospel had confided that he would be betrayed, mocked, crucified and on the third day raised. Looking on Jesus pierced for our offenses, it’s normal for our eyes and heart to be filled with blood and water, with pain and sorrow, of their own.
• But as we behold Jesus this way, despised, drubbed, dead and seemingly defeated, the question asked in the high priest’s courtyard of St. Peter can likewise be asked of each of us. “You are not one of that man’s disciples, are you?” You don’t want to follow this guy, do you? You don’t live by this crucified loser’s teachings, do you? Didn’t he tell you that in order to be his disciple, you yourself need to pick up your cross each day and follow him toward crucifixion, right? You don’t want what happened to him to happen to you, do you? These are tough, direct questions, just as personal and poignant for us in 2024 as they were for Peter early in the morning on that first Good Friday.
• We know how Peter responded. Even though hours earlier during the Last Supper he had said, “Though all may have their faith in you shaken, mine will never be,” and “even if I should have to die for you, I will not deny you” (Mt 26:33-35), before the cock crowed a second time, he had three times denied even knowing Jesus. When the going had gotten tough, even though Peter really did love the Lord, even though he really was a fervent disciple and a chosen apostle, even though he had lived with Jesus non-stop for three years, even though he had heard him preach, make the blind sea, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the lame walk, the lepers cleansed, the winds calmed, the seas abated, the demons expunged and even the dead raised, even after he himself had been given the Lord’s authority to preach, heal the sick, expel demons and raise the dead, he denied that he was Lord’s follower and friend not just once, not just twice, but three times. Why did this happen to Saint Peter?
• Jesus himself gave us the fundamental reason in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Peter, James and John didn’t have the will to stay awake to pray. Jesus told them, “Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mk 14:38). Despite his bravado, despite the knife he would wield to cut off the ear of the high priest’s guard Malchus, Peter’s flesh was weak because he wasn’t yet a man of vigilant prayer. He didn’t realize the dangers. He wasn’t prepared through prayer to remain faithful when things got tough. Ultimately, he wasn’t ready for the Cross. When Jesus gave the first prediction of his Passion, it was right after Simon Peter, responding to the grace of God the Father, had confessed Jesus to be the Messiah and the Son of the Living God. But when Jesus told him that he would be a suffering Messiah, Peter objected and said, “God forbid it, Lord! No such thing should ever happen to you!,” before Jesus called him “Satan,” and told him to get behind him rather than to try to lead him. Peter, however, really didn’t learn the lesson. On later occasions when Jesus predicted his passion and betrayal, Peter and the other disciples, rather than praying about what would occur and being vigilant, just debated which among them was the greatest — and no doubt Peter, who had had his name changed by Jesus to “Rock,” would have been making his own case for intra-apostolic supremacy (Mt 16:13-26). Peter’s lack of seriousness in preparing for what the Lord Jesus had said numerous times would occur all culminated in the high priest’s courtyard when his weak flesh couldn’t summon the courage to confess with a willing spirit that he was indeed Jesus’ disciple and that Jesus was still very much the Messiah and Son of the Living God, to whom we should go because he has the Words of Eternal Life.
• Have we learned from Peter’s infamous and sinful failure? Each of us is here, not out of curiosity on a Friday afternoon, but because we are a disciple of Jesus. We do believe in him. We are grateful for loving us so much that he gave his life so that we might not perish but have eternal life. But are we ready to confess our faith in him, our friendship, when the going gets tough? When someone, for example, invites us to do something else on Good Friday than spend the day with Jesus or to spend time with them on the Lord’s Day than come to Mass, what do we say? How do we respond when someone pressures us into experimenting with drugs or tries to exploit our loneliness to take advantage of us sexually? How do we respond when our peers raise hot button political issues on which the obvious Christian position is unpopular? What do we do when telling the truth is inconvenient? How do we react when everyone else is cheating and we’re tempted to think we have to do the same in order to keep up? When people mock Jesus’ teachings on chastity, poverty and obedience in favor of hedonism, materialism and libertarian individualism? Or even when someone invites us for lunch on a Friday in Lent and orders us a hamburger? All of these are means by which our contemporaries say to us: You are not really that man’s disciple are you? You don’t really take his teachings seriously, do you? So the question is: Are we really Jesus’ disciple? Are we willing to suffer, even a little, for him? Are ready, through vigilant prayer, to suffer a lot for him who suffered everything for us?
• Last year I mentioned the powerful, award-winning 2019 movie called A Hidden Life about the martyr Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian Catholic who was executed by the Nazis in 1943 for his opposition to their ideology. There is a scene in which Franz, a volunteer sacristan in his village Church in Radegund, was helping an artist named Ohlendorf as he was painting in the Church a beautiful image of Jesus surrounded by angels in glory. But it wasn’t what Ohlendorfreally wanted to paint. The painter said that he really longed to be able to depict Jesus in his real exaltation, his real glorification, on the Cross, with his body torn apart, blood pouring down his face and from his wounds, a true icon of Isaiah’s words from today’s first reading. Trusting in Franz, Ohlendorf spoke of artists like himself working for Church commissions and said, “What we do is just create sympathy. We create admirers. We don’t create followers. Christ’s life is a demand. [They] don’t want to be reminded of it. … I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo over his head. … Someday I might have the courage to venture, not yet. Someday I’ll paint the true Christ. … I help people look up from those pews and dream. They look up and they imagine if they [had] lived back in Christ’s time, they wouldn’t have done what the others did. They wouldn’t have murdered those whom we now adore.” Ohlendorf’s point was that, in Austria under the Nazis, there were many admirers of Christ, but few true disciples. The fans or admirers were all capitulating to the National Socialists despite all their lies and atrocities. Franz, on the other hand, proved to be a true disciple and remained faithful to his conscience all the way until the Nazis beheaded him. He remained a true disciple despite his cowardly parish priest and overly-calculating bishop both trying to persuade him to take a Nazi oath falsely just to save his life in this world. Even when those who were supposed to be true disciples were preferring a “comfortable Christ” and an easy-going Gospel, Franz was willing to stand up for the truth and not run away from the Cross. When he was asked, essentially, “You’re not that man’s disciple, are you?,” he firmly said that he was and he proved it. The same Lord who strengthened him will strengthen us if only we cooperate.
• To be a disciple of the Lord is to sign up to follow a crucified Savior and to follow him all the way. The Church seeks to make this clear at the very beginning of a Christian’s life. During the baptismal ceremony of a little child, after the parents give the child’s name and ask the Church for baptism, faith and eternal life for their child, they accept the responsibility of raising the child in the practice of the faith, and the Godparents commit to helping them in that supreme duty. Then the bishop, priest or deacon says to the child, “The Church of God receives you with great joy. In her name, I sign you with the Sign of the Cross of Christ Our Savior; then, after me, your parents and godparents will do the same.” He then makes a sign of the Cross on the child’s forehead, and the mom and dad, the godfather and godmother all do so. When I prepare young parents for the baptism of their child, I always ask them why, they think, the Church starts off the whole baptism ceremony by making the cross five times over their beautiful little son or daughter. The most common answer is, “I don’t know.” The second most common answer is, “We’re asking God to bless the child.” But then I ask, “Well, why don’t we just put our hand on the baby’s head if we’re blessing?” I then query: if at that point of the baptism ceremony, the Church were instead to ask all five of us to put a hemp stamp of an electric chair, or a noose, guillotine or some other sign of public execution on their beautiful baby’s forehead, wouldn’t they think that that was at least a little weird? They do. So then, I ask anew, “Why do you think we make a sign of the Cross on their forehead?” We are indeed blessing the baby, recognizing that the cross is not a curse but a blessing. When parents and godparents bring a child to be baptized, they are committing to raise the baby in the school of the Cross, which is not fundamentally a sign of pain, but of the love that makes even the pain of crucifixion bearable, as Christ has taught us. This is super counterintuitive for most parents, who would prefer their child never even to catch a cold. They have fairytale-esque hopes for their child whom they want to be happy all the days of life and therefore, they think, never suffer. But Christians preach a different message, of a love for God and others that includes a willingness to suffer, to die, and even to be crucified. After our baptism, as we know, we’re taught to make the sign of the Cross over ourselves. We begin and finish every Mass with the Sign of the Cross. The sign of the Cross is involved in every other sacrament and in almost every form of ecclesial blessing. And on Good Friday, we venerate the Cross, genuflecting before it like we would before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, because, as we’ll sing later in the liturgy, we recognize that on the wood of the Cross hung the Savior of the World. The Christian life is one marked by the blessing of the Cross from its beginning to its end.
• Good Friday is a day on which the Church puts before us the wood of the Cross and the Crucified Christ so that we know what we’re committing to whenever someone should ask, in one way or another, “You’re not that man’s disciple are you?” It’s a day on which we, looking at him whom we have pierced, learn how to love him and others as he has loved us first. It’s a day on which we are strengthened to make the commitment to follow Christ each day along the way of the Cross, to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow the Crucified one, and to find in the cross God’s power, wisdom and glory.
• Yesterday I received an email from a priest friend in Uganda who is a spiritual director in a seminary teeming with future priests. Every June 3, the feast of the Ugandan martyrs, I try to email him and to find out how they’re celebrating. The Ugandan martyrs are one of the greatest stories in the history of the Church. There were 22 of them, between the ages of 14-25, killed in the mid-1880s, just a few years after the White Fathers had arrived as missionaries. Because he liked the Christian teaching on the afterlife, the Ugandan king had allowed missionaries to evangelize among the members of his court, including the pages. Some Ugandan members of the court, having converted, began to evangelize others and help them renounce slavery, polygamy and other practices contrary to the Gospel, and to dedicate themselves heroically to serving those in need. When the baptized Joseph Mkasa and the catechumen Charles Lwanga began to recognize, however, that the king was homosexually-attracted to the teenage boys and solicitous to have them brought into his private company, they sought by various means to thwart the king’s designs and teach the boys how to resist his advances. The king grew increasingly frustrated. The King decided brutally to execute Joseph Mkasa for disloyalty, for having put the commands of another king, “The God of the Christians,” over him. He made it known that he was intending to put to death all the Christians in his court. One day, after the king returned from a fishing trip and saw one of the routine objects of his sordid desire receiving catechetical instruction, he summoned the catechist, St. Denis Ssebuggwawo, put a spear through his chest and then had his executioners hack him to pieces. The following day, the king, fuming, assembled all the pages and demanded that they make a choice between God and him, between life and death. “Let all those who do not pray stay here by my side,” he said, waving to his right, and “those who pray” he told to stand by the fence at his left. Charles Lwanga and over 20 Christian pages headed toward the fence. He asked them whether they intended to remain Christians. “Until death!,” they replied. “Then put them to death!,” the king responded, sentencing them to be burnt alive in Namugongo, a village 37 miles away. That is what happened. All of them, not long after their baptism, about the age of Columbia students and even younger, chose to remain Christians, chose to be people of prayer and vigilance, chose Christ and the Cross over their murderous leader and his corrupt court, chose eternal life over earthly life. When they were asked, “You are not this man’s disciples, are you?,” they all replied, with courage and conviction, that they were, that they indeed knew the God-man, and would remain true to him until death. They show us what is possible for every Christian.
• To be a disciple is to choose to stand before Jesus at the foot of the Cross, like Mary, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene and John. To be a disciple is to carry the Cross together with Jesus like Simon. To be a disciple is to be willing to say it to and live it, despite natural human fears. We strengthen our flesh against those fears each day by self-denial. Just as people in past centuries would take ice cold baths in the winter to prepare them better to handle the cold outside, just like good coaches work their players hard in practice to prepare them for game time pressures, just like those in boot camp are put into difficult training situations to prepare to endure and overcome them afterward, so self-denial helps us to be willing to carry the Cross, to be faithful in season and out of season. Picking up our Cross each day to follow Christ allows us to be able to pick it up when our own Good Friday comes and, in response to the question, “You’re not that man’s disciple, are you?,” to be able to reply like the Ugandan Martyrs, like Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, like Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John, “Yes I am,” with gratitude and unabashed. We are indeed disciples of Jesus, the one who loved us to the end, the one who prayed for us on Calvary, the one who has called us to follow him through Calvary to the eternal Jerusalem. We are indeed disciples of the one who has conquered the world. To him be praise and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power and might, forever and ever. Amen!

The Gospel of the Passion on which the homily was based was: 

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