In my role as one of the assistant chaplains, I often speak with students about silence– the importance of silence in their prayer lives and discernment. Finding times of silence in our overly programmed lives can be so difficult and countercultural, especially when they are still developing their prayer habits during college. Silence is one of the best places to listen for and meet our God, and learn more about ourselves away from the noises of daily life.
The silence we contemplate today is not that type of silence. Today we contemplate the harrowing silence of the death of Christ. The silence Christ faced on Good Friday is the silence in the face of their wrongdoings and silence where there should have been dignity, creativity, and life. This type of silence is the ally of death and the men who tortured and killed Jesus, used violence to coerce silence out of vibrant life. This insidious silence is the result of sin, the silence that was inflicted on Jesus on that first Good Friday, and part of what we remember today.
In Jesus’ passion and death, those who put Him to death wanted to boil down all of Him—his message, his life, his whole self down to those fleeting moments of hurt, pain, and suffering. They wanted to minimize Christ until his death would be the forever end of the itinerant preacher from Nazareth, the miracle worker who gathered thousands, and preached about the Kingdom of God, a God of love. They wished to sum up his crime with the epiphat, “He said he was the King of the Jews,” and were infuriated instead when it read “King of the Jews.” They wanted the final word on the Word of God, to make him smaller and smaller until he was gone. Silence.
So that is how we commemorate this day. With silence.
But there are two types of silence. The first, as we have seen, is the silence that is the enemy to God, the demeaning silence that crushes human life for the short-sighted goal of power. But today we practice another type of silence, a silence championed by Christ in His death. This silence is true power, the power of our Lord. When Christ was silenced and put to death on that cross, that was not the end of the story, and it is not the end of our story. Because in that moment of ultimate human weakness, Christ took all that evil and sin upon himself and transformed it into our salvation. Easter is the resounding rejection of weaponized silence, the silence of violence and death.
So instead the silence we pray with today is the silence of solace, the silence needed to listen for God. This is the silence of Jesus praying to God in the Garden. At times it may feel lonely, but we are never alone in this silence, in this silence we always have a brother in Christ, a Father in God. In our quiet moments we may only have this silence, this prayerful silence that contains in it the mystery of God and all of creation.
The silence we find in Christ is filled with Hope. In Christ we find our hope. His suffering and death turns fear and violence on their heads and instead of cowering in fear, we find hope, hope in God, hope in salvation, and hope that it will be better. The silence of abandonment is only responded to with hope. Today, like always, we draw our hope from Christ’s sacrifice.
Christ’s death was not the end of the story. He transformed it into something beyond time, into our very salvation. We are called to reject the silence of fear and death and instead embrace the silence of prayer and contemplative love—a way of being that leads to the Kingdom of God. “From the cross, the Lord is calling us to love fully. We welcome the Kingdom of service which Jesus brought to us in solidarity with everyone and especially with the most marginalized, those who need our friendship.”
