Welcome to #QuarantineChurch!
What happened on the first Good Friday?
Quite a number of things. During the night, Jesus had been arrested and taken before the high priests Annas and Caiaphas. It was during this time that Peter denied him.
According to the gospels, Jesus:
- Was taken before Pilate in the morning
- Sent to Herod
- Returned to Pilate
- Was mocked and beaten
- Saw Barabbas released in his stead
- Was crowned with thorns
- Was condemned to death
- Carried the crushing burden of his cross
- Told the weeping women what would happen in the future
- Was crucified between two thieves
- Forgave those who crucified him
- Entrusted the Virgin Mary to the beloved disciple
- Assured the good thief of his salvation
- Said his famous seven last words
- Cried out and died
In addition:
- There was darkness over the land
- There was an earthquake
- The veil of the temple was torn in two
- Many saints of the Old Testament period were raised
- A soldier pierced Christ’s side and blood and water flowed out
- Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus went to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body
- He was buried in Joseph’s own tomb
- A guard was set over the tomb
- All Jesus’ friends and family grieved at his death
If you’d like to read the gospel accounts themselves, you can use these links:
One of our sister churches is offering a service today at 3 pm.
Below is the Zoom link.You may participate in one of three ways:
1) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://zoom.us/j/270693957Password: 111196
2) Open your browser and type in https://zoom.usClick on “Join a Meeting”When prompted, enter Meeting ID: 270 693 957 and Password: 111196
3) From your phone, dialOne tap mobile+16465588656,,270693957# US (New York)+13126266799,,270693957# US (Chicago)Dial by your location +1 646 558 8656 US (New York) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 301 715 8592 USWhen prompted, enter Meeting ID: 270 693 957 and Password: 111196Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/acLtuW2FgM
Order of Service
St. Mary Magdalene Online
Good Friday – April 10, 2020
Introduction
Opening Song: Come Healing by Leonard Cohen
O gather up the brokenness And bring it to me now The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow The splinters that you carry The cross you left behind Come healing of the body Come healing of the mind
And let the heavens hear it The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit Come healing of the limb
Behold the gates of mercy In arbitrary space And none of us deserving
The cruelty or the grace O solitude of longing Where love has been confined
Come healing of the body Come healing of the mind
O see the darkness yielding That tore the light apart
Come healing of the reason Come healing of the heart
O troubled dust concealing An undivided love The heart beneath is teaching
To the broken heart above Let the heavens falter Let the earth proclaim
Come healing…
Sign of Cross/Greeting
Opening Prayer
Community Intentions
1st Reflection: “The Stations of the Cross are simply an excursion through the hard moments of life as those periods are demonstrated in the life of Jesus himself. They give us a model of how to live life when our own suffering is unavoidable, and life seems most impossible. Then, knowing that Jesus has gone the way of injustice, fatigue, failure and defeat before us, gives our own present difficulties both new light and new hope. We pray the Stations of the Cross in both good times and bad in order to learn how to live and to remember that when the dark days come, we are not alone in them.” Sr. Joan Chittister
“It is amazing to me that the cross became the central Christian logo, when its rather obvious message of inevitable suffering is aggressively disbelieved in most Christian countries, individuals, and churches. We are clearly into ascent, achievement, and accumulation. The cross became a mere totem, a piece of jewelry. We made the Jesus symbol into a mechanical and distant substitutionary atonement theory instead of a very personal and intense at-one-ment process, the very reality of love’s unfolding. We missed out on the positive and redemptive meaning of our own pain and suffering. It was something Jesus did for us (substitutionary), but not something that revealed and invited us into the same pattern. We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by our sins (such as blindness, egocentricity, illusions, or pride).” Fr. Richard Rohr
1 minute of Silence
Sharing
2nd Reflection: The 1st Station: Jesus is condemned to die
“The 1st station requires us to examine our entire philosophy of life. Jesus is condemned to die because he defied the standards of both the state and the religious establishment in which he lived. To both, he brought a truth they did not want to hear. He set out to witness to the love and justice of the God of all creation: Jews and non-Jews, women as well as men, underlings as well as the professional types of his time. He cured on the Sabbath, mixed with foreigners, taught theology to women, played with children, questioned every law, chose people over ritual every time, never made authority a god. He threatened the establishment with his incessant attempts to build a better world, and they destroyed him for it.” Sr. Joan Chittister
“The church of COVID-19 bears a striking resemblance to the post-resurrection community of the upper room — vulnerable and interconnected, yet frightful of physical proximity.
Thankfully the curtailment of sacramental and congregational worship has spurred the people of God to discover unorthodox spaces for communion and connection. We are inventing alternative ways of celebrating and ministering unto ourselves using relatively affordable online tools.
Absent any predictions, I dream of a post-coronavirus church with doors open to a new Pentecost that blows social distances away and frees consciences of bureaucratic, clericalist and hierarchical structures and certainties in which we were schooled to place our trust. I dream of a church receptive to new ways of practicing solidarity and compassion in response to Jesus’ commission to be women and men for others.
If realized, this dream would embody Pope Francis’ model of church-as-field-hospital, where all who minister in the name of the Gospel take a leaf from the book of heroic healthcare workers during COVID-19 and venture into existential peripheries to welcome and tend casualties of social, economic, political and ecological isolation and exclusion. In other words, a church that speaks Ubuntu: I am because you are.
Failing that, I’d settle for a post-coronavirus church that adopts tele-ministry to enable the faithful to fulfill sacramental needs via Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp or Zoom with clear conscience.” Fr. Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, SJ
1 minute of Silence
Sharing
3rd Reflection: The 6th Station: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
“The 6th station calls us to realize that compassion is the counterpart of justice. To fail to practice mercy in the presence of injustice is to neglect half the face of God. It is not enough to harbor a sense of righteous anger when the poor are oppressed. It is necessary to reach down and lift them from the pit of their despair. It’s a false zeal that focuses on the addiction but ignores the addict, that calls others to family values but gives no child beyond our own a helping hand, that deplores discrimination but avoids homosexuals. Justice punishes criminals, yes, but mercy refuses to ignore their needs. Justice seeks the vision, but mercy makes it real. Justice follows the ideal, but mercy recognizes the weakness in ourselves and so holds the weaknesses of others in a tender hand. Veronica walked out of the crowd of curious onlookers and horrified spectators and bloodthirsty zealots and performed a work of mercy, no questions asked, no judgments rendered.
The question with which the sixth station confronts us is, Who is there – whose life do you deplore – that you have reached out to help? Our place is not to usurp the power of God to forgive but to sustain the person in the long wait for conversion.” Sr. Joan Chittister
“In Jesus, people experienced the face and heart of God. They participated in and with the Divine. They didn’t just look on from the distance. We are, and must remain, community, whether big or small, inspired and animated by the One whose life was changed not taken away. Over the last couple of weeks, cut off from friends and quarantined in my home, a quotation from the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas I jotted down years ago bobbed in my head. Levinas said the only thing that really changes people deeply is “an encounter with the face of the other.” John Dick
Meditation: The Face of God
You are the face of God. I hold you in my heart. You are a part of me. You are the face of God. (Repeat 2 more times)
You are the face of love. I hold you in my heart. You are my family. You are the face of God.
(Repeat)
You are the face of God. I hold you in my heart. You are a part of me. You are the face of God.
You are the face of God. You are the face of God. (Repeat)
Sharing
4th Reflection: The 9th Station: Jesus falls the third time
“The 9th station demands we persevere in doing good, in being what we must be, in holding our course even when the pressures around us mount to break our spirits. Just when we think we have come to a plateau in life, things change. The job disappears, the home begins to fragment, sickness slows us down, and relationships break our heart. It all seems useless. All the efforts seem to be for nothing. Then it is time to realize that there is nothing we now take for granted in life that wasn’t first considered either impossible to do or insane even to think about. That’s when getting up and starting over becomes one of the miracles of life. When Jesus falls, Jesus certainly wants to quit.
The questions with which the 9th station confronts us are challenging ones: Are we about something big enough to be worth every effort of our lives? And if not, why not? If we are not involved in something that demands the unstinting best of us and threatens the very core of us, what is life about?” Sr. Joan Chittister
“Today we face the fragility of life so immediately that at times, like the virus itself, we are left breathless. And we face the mortifying frustration of being unprotected: lacking the tests, masks and ventilators; these lifesavers are not in our reach.
Consider this. Many of us are experiencing a pandemic for the first time, yet others have known the ravages of malaria, tuberculosis, maternal and infant mortality, AIDS, Ebola — the lists goes on. Likewise, they know that treatments are there, but not within reach.
We have kept those illnesses from our doorsteps for years, but not from theirs. Unaffected, we could live with news of their struggles.
Can we now? Now that we know the terror of a pandemic and the tangible alienation of lacking available resources, can we return to our old ways of living?” Fr. James Keenan, SJ
1 minute of Silence
Sharing
5th Reflection: The 12th Station: Jesus dies on the cross
“The 12th station brings us face-to-face with the finality of defeat. Sometimes things don’t have a happy ending in life. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we’re beaten. Sometimes we’re lost. Sometimes we’re humiliated. Sometimes we’re misunderstood. Sometimes we are abandoned by the very people we love most in life and whom we thought also loved us. At that point, without doubt, something in us dies. There’s no going back to things as they were before. Then doors close in our hearts and all the old breath goes out of us and all we can do is to surrender to the dark. It is not a pretty moment. It can take all the energy we have.
The question with which the twelfth station confronts us is an awesome one: Am I able to accept the daily deaths of life, both the great ones and the small, knowing that death is not the end of life, only its passing over to something new in me? Hopefully, I learn from the Jesus who gave up himself, his mission, his life in ways that all seemed totally wrong, that the deaths I die may bring new life to the world around me as well.” Sr. Joan Chittister
“Will our experience of fear, uncertainty and powerlessness transform our consciousness so that we will identify and empathize with refugees, the undocumented, the chronically ill and the impoverished whose suffering does not end after a few months of quarantine?
Will we grow in our awareness of and gratitude for the stability, security, abundance, health and home that we enjoy and often take for granted?
Will we find new reverence for our Earth that sustains us with water, food and, yes, even toilet paper?
Will we learn that hoarding doesn’t give us control, it only deprives others?
Will we find ways to permanently change our habits to save our ailing planet?” Jamie Manson
The cross reminds us that at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical elements of life there is always a body. In the Body of Christ we see all the bodies of this world. Where have you seen the face of Christ in the past month?
1 minute of Silence
Sharing
6th Reflection: The 14th Station: Jesus is laid in the tomb
“The 14th station brings us to grapple with the grace of closure. Some phases of life end and cannot be retrieved. They go by before we’re ready to see them go. Worse, their going may feel like ignominy at the time or may even look to the world like failure. It may sting with grave injustice and may grieve us beyond all telling of it. But only in the ability to realize that life goes on from one stage to another, from one moment to another, from one task to another, from one kind of presence to another can we ever come to new life. When Jesus submits to the death of his ministry, when Jesus allows both state and synagogue to cast him out, one life ends so that another one can begin.
Give me the grace to see in all the dead ends of my life an invitation to new life. The question, which the 14th station leaves in our souls, is a resounding one: Am I able to trust that the tombs of my life are all gateways to resurrection?” Sr. Joan Chittister
Tomb time by Sarah Rule
There is a time
between suffering
and rising
a pause
it may be
a day
or
a night
or
an hour
a time
to be still
tended
wrapped
perfumed
a time
for others to care
to hold
to embalm
the pause
the space between
be still
and know
that God is there
before the rising
behind the stone
in the dark
and you
as you open
to Love
your spirit will quicken again
1 minute of Silence
Sharing
Closing Prayer
Blessing
Closing Song: Lean on Me by Bill Withers
Sometimes in our lives we all have pain We all have sorrow But if we are wise
We know that there’s always tomorrow.
Lean on me, when you’re not strong And I’ll be your friend I’ll help you carry on
For it won’t be long ‘Til I’m gonna need Somebody to lean on.
Please swallow your pride If I have things you need to borrow
For no one can fill those of your needs That you won’t let show.
You just call on me brother, when you need a hand We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you’ll understand We all need somebody to lean on.
Lean on me, when you’re not strong And I’ll be your friend I’ll help you carry on
For it won’t be long ‘Til I’m gonna need Somebody to lean on.
You just call on me brother, when you need a hand We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you’ll understand We all need somebody to lean on.
If there is a load you have to bear that you can’t carry
I’m right up the road I’ll share your load if you just call me.
Call me if you need a friend. Call me…