by CCW | 2 April 2010 15:07
Good Friday Readings and Meditations on the Mystery of Human Redemption
An Ecumenical Service of Devotions on the Seven Last Words at Christ Church, Windsor, sponsored by the West Hants Ministerial Association
Introductory Reading: Luke 10. 25-37 (Parable of the Good Samaritan)
Meditation:
“Christ pierced upon the Crosse is liber charitatis, the book of love laid open to us” to read, Lancelot Andrewes tells us. That is the special challenge of this day which we call Good Friday. Luke, in a wonderful phrase, tells us that “all the people hung upon his words”. In a way, it is our task to hang upon the words of the one who hangs on the Cross for us and for our salvation.
We meet to ponder the deep mystery of human redemption in the passion and death of Christ. For centuries in the West, there has been the tradition of gathering on this day to ponder the mystery of Christ crucified through meditation upon The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross.
And yet there is a challenge. The seven last words of the Crucified are rich and powerful, disturbing and disquieting words that concentrate so much of the Scriptures for us, especially those books which as Christians we call the Old Testament, as well as the whole story of Jesus Christ revealed in the witness of the New Testament. The Seven Last Words belong to the tradition of the Church in her faithful response to the Words of the Crucified as found in all four Gospels but as necessarily seen in relation to the whole of the Scriptures. We cannot ponder the words of the Crucified except in relation to the whole pageant of human redemption revealed in the Scriptures.
How, then, do we read? That is the question. Providentially, it is a scriptural question. It is actually Jesus’ question to a lawyer who stood up to challenge him. The scene is the setting for Christ’s telling of a marvelous parable, the parable of the Good Samaritan, itself the illustration of the answers about the love of God and the love of neighbour that he elicits from his erstwhile antagonist.
It may seem rather strange that on Good Friday we should think about this all too familiar story but, I fear, our familiarity gets in the way of appreciating its radical meaning. The question, “how readest thou?” meaning how do you understand, goes to the heart of our enterprise today and, indeed, to the journey of our lives in faith. It relates directly to the theme of the atonement between God and Man that belongs to the business of Good Friday. Something is transacted on the Cross for us and for our good.
Dialectic, literally, a reading through. This week of our reading through the Passion reaches its fullness of intensity on this day which, in a kind of wonder, we call Good Friday. The Passion in all its Gospel fullness is read in the context of the canvass of the Scriptures in their richness. What we are given to read is one thing; how we read is another thing. “How do you read?”
The lawyer who was putting Jesus to the test, trying to trap him in his words, as it were, ask the question, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” In other words, ‘How do I get the best thing going?’ Jesus’ response was to ask him, “What is written in the law? How readest thou?” The lawyer proceeds to answer by way of the summary of the law – the love of God and the love of neighbour. “This do,” Jesus says, “and thou shalt live.” “But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?” The exchange of questions becomes the setting for the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The parable is intended to illustrate those two interconnected loves; the love of God and the love of humanity. In short, there can be no love of neighbour without the love of God and our love of God is empty and meaningless without its expression in the forms of our love for one another whether friend or stranger.
The question, “How do you read?” means “how do you understand what has been revealed to you?” The point is that we are given something to see, something to read, in other words, something that requires our attention and commitment.
The parable in its deeper meaning is an allegory of the story of Creation and the Fall and of human redemption and pastoral care. The Samaritan who came where he was is the image of Christ. He has come to where we are in our brokenness and our woundedness.
The point is not just that the Priest and Levite “see and pass by”; the deeper point, I think, is that they can only see and pass by. We cannot heal ourselves or one another. The Law, too, cannot heal us; it can only convict us of our need. Nowhere in the parable is the Samaritan actually called the Good Samaritan. That is the title we give the story precisely through reading Christ as the Good Samaritan, the one who “had compassion on him, and went to him, [binding] up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set[ting] him on his own beast,” his body, “[bringing] him to an inn, [taking] care of him,” and providing for his future care. Might that possibly mean the Church? “The certain man” [who] “went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves” who “stripped him” of all he had and “wounded him”, “leaving him half-dead,” is all of us. Jericho is the biblical image of the worldly city over and against the image of Jerusalem, the heavenly city.
In the mystery of Holy Week, it seems to me, we contemplate the greater meaning and reality of the care and compassion of Christ the Good Samaritan. The passion is about his willingness to bear the full meaning of sin and suffering, of sorrow and death. Why? So that we might know two things: sin and love.
In the crucified Christ we confront our sins and we contemplate the overcoming of sin. Such is the mercy of the Cross. We behold the radical meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. He has come near to us to restore us to the divine fellowship through the most intense and disturbing act of sacrifice and service imaginable; it is the way of the Cross. We can only begin to learn about care and compassion through the intensity of Christ’s passion. Only as convicted of our own sinfulness, can we be convinced of the divine love that seeks our good. Only so can we begin to go and do likewise, the grace of Christ’s passion moving in us. Such is the love without which “all our doings are nothing worth.”
We cannot heal ourselves or one another with respect to the radical disarray of our humanity which is on full display in the Crucifixion of Christ. We can only read and let what we read rule and move in us; in short, letting the grace of the wounded healer heal our wounded souls. If we will read.
Christ reigns and rules from the tree of his cross. We read the passion of Christ to learn the lessons of divine love. Only so can we “go and do likewise.” Walking in love as Christ has loved us. It is what we are given to read. “Christ pierced upon the Crosse is liber charitatis, the book of love laid open to us.”
Let us pray:
O God our Father, holy and merciful, who didst give thine only Son to be a sacrifice for us: Look mercifully upon us, we beseech thee, as before his cross we meditate and pray; and give us faith so to behold him in the mystery of his passion, that we may enter into the fellowship of his sufferings; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Reading: 2 Samuel 11. 2-10, 14-17, 26-27, 12.1-7 (The Story of David’s Sin)
Meditation: “Thou art the man”
The story of David is the story of all of us. “His Person includes all states, between a shepherd and a King;” a poet and a warrior, too, we might add. In a way, David epitomises the whole of Israel and by extension the whole of humanity. But David epitomises the whole of Israel and the whole of our humanity, not only in its truth but also in its untruth. “His sin includes all sin” (John Donne).
“The Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart,” it is famously said. It is actually said about David. We are given to see the heart of David which God sees and in it we are given to see something about ourselves. In his story we read about the mirror in which David confronts himself in his sinfulness and we read about the window through which he sees God in his chastening mercy. The mirror which Nathan holds up is the parable which he tells the King. What has David done? Well, everything and more.
He sees the beautiful Bathsheba, the wife of the loyal soldier, Uriah the Hittite, bathing. The lust conceived in his heart leads to an act of adultery with Bathsheba. He lies with her and she conceives a child. He contrives to cover this up by recalling Uriah from battle to go to his home and sleep with his wife, hoping to pass off the child as Uriah’s. But his plan is foiled by Uriah’s loyalty to the warrior’s code; he sleeps not in his bed with Bathsheba, but at the door of the king in solidarity with his soldiers in the field. David, then, conspires to have Uriah placed in the forefront of the battle “that he may be struck down and die,” which is what happens. With Uriah out of the way, David is free to take Bathsheba as his wife and she bears him a son.
In a phrase that is almost breath-taking in its power of understatement, we are told, “but the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” To be sure! Just consider. He coveted another man’s wife – violating the tenth commandment; he committed adultery – violating the seventh commandment; and he engineered the death of Uriah – thereby violating the sixth commandment. The Ten Commandments, it is worth noting, are all included in the first, “I am the Lord thy God; Thou shalt have none other gods but me”. David’s act is a denial of the first and, in a way, a denial of all the commandments. The sequence itself is instructive about the progress of sin, moving from desires within to acts of illicit sex and murder involving greater and greater degrees of deceit and treachery.
We are given a window into the soul of David. But it is a window through which God gives us to look. That is the great mercy.
“Thou art the man,” Nathan the prophet, the voice of conscience, says to King David who has convicted and judged himself by his response to the story about the poor man and his one little ewe lamb. “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die” David said. The parable is the mirror that Nathan holds up for David to see himself. Caught out, does David try to justify himself with protestations and excuses? No. He simply repents. Indeed, the great psalm of repentance, Psalm 51, is understood to be rooted in David’s deep awareness of his sin. “Against thee only have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight.”
In this first word from the Cross we read about the divine love which redeems our human loves. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” There can be no more gentle word from the Crucified than this, the word by which we are brought to see ourselves and God’s redemption for us. It is at once a mirror and a window, a mirror in which we confront our sins and a window through which we glimpse God’s love. Ecce homo, behold the man. In Christ crucified, we behold the redeemer of our humanity.
Responsory Prayer #1
Leader: Against thee only have I sinned,
People: And done that which is evil in thy sight.
Let us pray:
Blessed Lord, you prayed forgiveness for those who nailed you to the cross, and taught us to forgive one another as you have forgiven us: Take away from us all bitterness and resentment towards one another, and give us the spirit of mutual forgiveness and brotherly love; that in perfect charity, we may be partakers of your everlasting kingdom; for your mercy’s sake. Amen.
Reading: Genesis 3: 8–13 (Adam & Eve hid in the Garden)
Meditation: “Where are you?”
It is God’s first and greatest question to our humanity. In a marvelous image, God is pictured like a good Hants County farmer out walking on his land in the cool of the day, at home with what is his own, we might say. It is a marvelous image of paradise, an image of the harmony between God and creation. But “the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God,” hiding in the woods, it seems.
God’s question is not about his seeking to know as if he didn’t. His question is rhetorical and is intended for us. Where are we? Metaphorical and metaphysical in its scope, the question convicts Adam and Eve about the fact of their disobedience, an act of the will which changes the nature of their relationship to God, to creation and to one another. The paradise of Creation has become the place of our estrangement. It is no longer paradise.
The question reverberates down through the ages in a myriad of questions. “Where were you when they crucified my Lord?” The point of such questions is that they are meant to convict us about our sinfulness. But simply left at that, then such questions become as intolerable as the burden of our sins is intolerable. Are we to be left with only the terrifying spectacle of our complete separation from all that is good and true? It is the true picture of sin, of course, and one which we cannot not see. But the point of this word lies in two things.
Repentance and prayer. The one thief or criminal who was crucified with Jesus rails in vicious rage at him. The other is penitent. He acknowledges his own guilt and Jesus’ innocence and then prays to Jesus not to be forgotten and unknown but rather to be remembered “when you come into your kingdom.”
Jesus’ second word indicates that the kingdom is paradise restored, something greater than at the beginning. What began in the garden of paradise ends in the hope of the garden of redemption. It is paradise plus. We can only want to be where Jesus wants us to be, namely, with him in his love for us.
Responsory Prayer #2
Leader: He was wounded for our transgressions,
People: He was bruised for our iniquities.
Let us pray:
Blessed Saviour, who at this hour did hang upon the cross, stretching forth your loving arms: Grant that all people may look to you and be saved; who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
Reading: Genesis 18. 1-15 (Under the shade of the Oaks of Mamre)
Meditation: “Sarah laughed”
In a wonderful passage in the Book of Genesis, Abraham encounters the Lord, it is said, as three men or three angels, under the shade of the oaks of Mamre. In a scene of exquisite oriental courtesy and ancient hospitality to the stranger or strangers, Abraham sacrifices a calf and hastens to prepare a feast for them as they “rest[ed] under the tree.” And, as the text, puts it, “he stood by them under the tree while they ate.” They – the plural is instructive and intriguing – ask him, “where is Sarah your wife?” but then, the promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah is given by the Lord in the singular, “I”. “I will return in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.” The ambiguities of ‘they’ and ‘I’, of the three and one, are profoundly suggestive.
The son is the promised son, Isaac, the one through whom God’s promise to Abraham that “through your seed all nations shall be blessed” will be continued. But the promised son, too, is the unwitting son of the intended sacrifice by Abraham in the terrifying scene of the test of Abraham’s faith. “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Isaac will innocently ask, to which Abraham will heart-wrenchingly reply, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” Indeed, “God will provide himself.” Here, Sarah, listening at the tent door, overhears the Lord’s promise to Abraham about a son and Sarah “laughed to herself,” saying in effect, how shall this be? since I and my husband have grown old.
The laughter of Sarah reverberates down throughout the centuries and expresses the ancient and, no doubt, contemporary sense of the unbridgeable distance between God and our humanity. Here the God from whom no secrets are hid and to whom all desires known challenges the laughter of Sarah. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” In fear, Sarah denies that she has laughed.
“With God”, of course, “all things are possible.” The laughter of Sarah will ultimately be redeemed by the question and response of Mary to the will of God conveyed by the message of an angel. “How shall this be?” Mary asks. As the counter to Sarah’s denial, there is Mary’s affirmation, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
Under the shadow of the Cross, the human community is reconstituted by the love of Christ. “Woman, behold your son,” and, to the disciple, “behold your mother.” Each is charged with care and responsibility for the other in the body of Christ, the Church. No matter how badly that mutual care and responsibility has been betrayed, and, indeed, by all of us, this word recalls us to what Christ commands and wants for us, our love for him as shown in our love for one another. Mary’s yes to God redeems Sarah’s mocking laughter.
Responsory Prayer #3
Leader: Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us,
People: And sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Let us pray:
O Lord Jesus Christ, who from the cross commended your mother into the care of the beloved disciple: Keep under your perpetual providence and care those to whom we are bound by ties of kindred and affection; and grant that the love which we know on earth may lead us onward to the love of you; who with the Father and the eternal Spirit are one holy Trinity of love, world without end. Amen.
The Fourth Word –
“My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?”
Reading: Job 1.1, 6-22, 2. 3-10, 3. 1-7, 23-24 (The Sufferings of Job)
Meditation: “Why is light given to a man whose way is hid”
We have in the fourth word the picture of perfect desolation and utter abandonment. It is a frightening and terrifying spectacle. It is, perhaps, the most haunting word of the Crucified, and certainly, the most disturbing and the most difficult to read.
Matthew and Mark alone attribute this word to Christ on the Cross. A quote from the Psalms, it captures that sense of Israel’s desolation and abandonment by God in her various trials and tribulations. There is something compelling about the directness of this kind of heart-wrenching cry. But the point is that while it expresses the most incredible depth of anguish, it is a prayer. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” It is a word with a direction – to God.
There is no more challenging word than this. It captures most completely the alienation from truth caused by sin. Here Christ experiences completely what belongs to the full meaning of sin. And yet, his word is a prayer borne out of the liturgy of Israel. Sometimes when we have no words of our own, God provides us with the words for our hearts, even the hearts of the God-forsaken.
The story of Job is the story of “a perfect man” who is afflicted and endures great adversity. Indeed, he is afflicted because he is viewed as perfect. But does his perfection consist in his quality of life, in his having it all, as it were, wealth and health and so forth? Let him be put to the test. And so he is. He experiences the loss of everything, property and family and is afflicted with boils and sits upon a heap of ashes. It is the proverbial picture of misery.
The Book of Job challenges the prosperity gospel. Job challenges the idea that if you are well-off, then you are right with God, and its corollary, that if you are suffering, it is because you have sinned, as if prosperity could be the reward and symptom of virtue! This leaves out of the picture the aspect of innocent suffering, suffering because of the actions of others, and the greater reality of a suffering that is borne of a fallen world. Job refuses the false comfort of the “comforters” because he sees that such a view is not worthy of God. And yet, he still questions. Why is the light of knowing given to me if all I know is suffering? How can that be God’s purpose in creating humans? Job asks questions. That is his great virtue. And God honours Job by asking him a question in return. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Who are you? Job recognizes that he doesn’t know; only God knows. God’s questioning response to Job opens us out to God’s own wonder at his creation and to what G.K. Chesterton refers to as “the comfort of paradox,” the paradox of the best man in the worst fortune.
Job’s story helps us read about the greater paradox of the Son who experiences abandonment by the Father and yet prays to the God who has forsaken him.
Responsory Prayer #3
Leader: The chastisement of our peace was upon him;
People: And with his stripes we are healed.
Let us pray:
O Lord Jesus Christ, whose most bitter passion has tasted death for every one, and has borne our sins in your own body on the tree: Grant us, we humbly pray, a broken and a contrite heart for all your sorrows, and the loosing from our sins in your most precious blood; that we may live henceforth as those who have been bought with a price, and glory only in your cross. Amen.
Reading: Numbers 20.2-13 (The temptations of Israel at Meribah)
Meditation: “Water from the Stricken Rock”
Stricken rock and piercèd side. “Out of the wounded side of the crucified Christ flow the sacraments of baptism and holy communion”, the ancient teachers of the Faith have said.
The ancient people of Israel thirsted in the wilderness of Sinai. Their thirst was at once something physical, signaling the basic human need for water and food. But the naming of their thirst in the wilderness was something else. It was a complaint against God.
The Book of Numbers is the book of our murmuring, our endless complaining. The insight of the Book of Numbers is that our complaints are often misdirected. Our complaints are about blaming God for our various misfortunes. The contemporary “entitlement” culture is about that form of complaint. Somehow we think we are owed a pleasant life without stress or worries, without anxieties and labour.
In our complaining, we become a complaint ourselves. Absorbed in our own fears and worries, we completely lose sight of the greater message of the Book of Numbers. We lose sight of God’s providential care for his wandering people. We even complain about the provisions which God makes for us in the wilderness.
Here the people of Israel complain about their condition in the wilderness such that they even wish they were back in Egypt. Egypt was the place of their enslavement and forced labour under Pharoah’s bitter yoke. And when God does provide for them with the manna in the wilderness, they complain that it is not as good as what they had before! And yet the wilderness journey is about liberation. Human freedom is not just from what constrains and restricts us, a negative freedom; it is also purposive and positive. The wilderness journey is about learning that our freedom and dignity is to be found in the will of God. In the wilderness, Israel will be given the Law.
The Scriptures abound with the stories of God’s providential care for his people: water from the stricken rock, manna from on high, Elijah’s being fed by the ravens, the provision of oil for the widow of Zarephath, Christ’s feeding the multitude in the wilderness, Christ the Good Samaritan providing for our wounded and broken humanity, and so on. The greatest provision, of course, will be Christ’s Resurrection.
Here, in this word, Jesus thirsts. His thirst is at once physical, an acknowledgement of his human suffering, but it also hints at something profoundly spiritual that belongs to the divine pageant of human redemption. God desires our good. We are created for love. The way of the Cross leads to the barren earth of the grave of Holy Saturday out of which will come the Resurrection; out of the dead side of the piercèd Christ flow blood and water.
Jesus’ word redeems the thirsts of our complaining humanity. Here in this word, the divine thirst and the human thirst meet. “My soul,” the psalmist says, “is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God.” Jesus thirsts for our redemption; even more, he is the stricken rock of our salvation.
Responsory Prayer #5
Leader: Worthy the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength,
People: And honour, and glory, and blessing.
Let us pray:
Blessed Lord, who on the cross endured the thirst both of spiritual desire and of physical anguish: Satisfy the longings of our hearts, we humbly pray, and sanctify all our sufferings by your own; who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Reading: Isaiah 53. 1-12 (The Suffering Servant)
Meditation: “He poured out his soul to death”
It is finished. All is accomplished. What is finished? What has been accomplished? How do we read this word?
It is the penultimate word and not the final word of the traditional seven last words of the Cross. Yet Jesus says, “it is finished.” There is a sense of an end. What kind of end? The dead ‘end’ of existence? Or ‘end’ in the sense of mission accomplished, purpose fulfilled?
Isaiah’s songs of the suffering servant speak about Israel’s new sense of mission and purpose, a mission and a purpose found through suffering. What kind of mission and purpose is that? One in which truth and righteousness are known, proclaimed and celebrated, the truth and righteousness of God, that is to say, a truth and a righteousness that is greater than our human understanding and our self-righteousness.
Christ is the suffering servant who bears in his body and soul all of the iniquities of our sinful humanity. All that stands between God and man, the whole package of sin and disorder, folly and sorrow, grief and death, has been embraced by the crucified Christ. All of the violence and wrath of our enmity against God is made visible on the Cross.
What is accomplished is the overcoming of sin by the triumph of suffering love. There is, literally, nothing more that can be done. Christ’s word reflects all the themes of the suffering servant songs. On the Cross we contemplate the full meaning and reality of sin and evil. We have had our way. God has let us have our way with him. We crucify Christ.
But he has willed to bear all our sins. That is the wonder and the strength of this sixth word. “All that we can do of ourselves,” Augustine says, “is sin.” All of that is “accomplished” on the cross. That is all his good; the good that embraces all our evil. He pours out his soul to death, the death that embraces my death and yours.
Responsory Prayer #6
Leader: We shall look on him
People: Whom we have pierced.
Let us pray:
O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, who takes away the sins of the world: Grant that as your sacrifice for our redemption was full, perfect, and sufficient, so nothing may be wanting in our service and sacrifice for you as members of your mystical body; for the honour and glory of your holy name, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Reading: John 17. 1-11 (Jesus’ ‘High Priestly’ Prayer)
Meditation: “That they may be one even as we are one”
The seven last words from the Cross begin and end with prayer. They begin and end with the Son’s prayer to the Father. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
The last word signals something more beyond what has been accomplished in the suffering love of the Son. What was his prayer to “My God, my God” in the agony of desolation has become his prayer to the Father. It signals the giving over of his entire being to the will of the Father. That is the meaning of his Sonship and the meaning of his Incarnation. “I have come to the will of him who sent me.”
The negative aspects of sin and death belonging to the mission of the Son have already been rehearsed. “It is finished.” Here we see what belongs to the greater reality of human redemption. “Not my will but thy will be done,” Christ prays in Gethsemane. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” Christ teaches us to pray in the “Our Father.” The full meaning of that prayer is seen in this word.
It is worship. Everything is gathered back to God through whom all things have come. The Word which goes forth in Creation goes forth in Redemption to gather back to God the whole world. The Word is the Father’s Word and Son who is one with the Father in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of the love of the Father and the Son. Nothing falls outside of the community of divine love which is read in this word.
We behold Christ’s charity on this day. To see our sins in Christ is to know his love who bears them. “He was pierced with love no less than with grief,” as Lancelot Andrewes puts it, “and it was that wound of love which made him so constantly to endure all the other.”
Christ’s charity opens out to us the infinite fellowship of the Son’s love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. The crucifixion reveals the infinite charity of the Trinity. In the very grip of death we behold the greater embrace of love.
It is wonderfully captured in a stone-carved image of the Holy Trinity found in the little church of Compton Regis in England. It is best described by Austin Farrer:
There he hangs, crucified, but on no visible cross: The nails fix him directly to the palms of the Father enthroned, who sits, his elbows in his lap, his hands spread out. The Father’s countenance is calm compassion, from his mouth downwards and a little aside a dove flies toward the thorn-encircled head. The Son is nailed to his Father’s will; he makes his sacrifice through the spirit of his Father’s benediction.
The Son is nailed to the Father’s will. He is nailed to a greater good than all our evil. It is the will of the Son to be so nailed. It is for our good, if so we will read. Christ’s highly priestly prayer provides the underlying logic of the passion. He seeks our union with him in his unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Responsory Prayer #7
Leader: Behold the Lamb of God,
People: Which taketh away the sin of the world.
Let us pray:
O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who at the ninth hour of the day, with outstretched hands and bowed head, commended your spirit to God the Father, and by your death unlocked the gates of paradise: Mercifully grant that in the hour of our death our souls may come to the true paradise of your love; who, with the Father and the Spirit, ever lives and reigns, one God, world without end. Amen.
© Meditations by Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Good Friday, 2010
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/04/02/good-friday-readings-and-meditations/
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