10 April 2020
Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion
My biological father died three weeks ago due to heart failure. To be true, I had a rocky relationship with dad as we were never that close. Nevertheless, his sudden death is still an earth-shattering event. I obviously could not go back to my home country for his funeral because of the travel restrictions due to the coronavirus in both the United States and my home country, Indonesia. The death of my father made me reflect more on the meaning of a good death or dying well. My dad’s passing did not have much of a trajectory. He passed away without saying any goodbye. The night before he died, he was looking good and having a nice conversation with my sister over the phone. The next morning, my mom woke up early and believed that my dad was still sleeping and alive. Later, she found his dead body in a seated position on the bed.
A few years ago, a Jesuit physician wrote an article titled On Dying Well. This Jesuit wrote that dying has its own trajectory, sometimes short and steep, sometimes with recurring crises and transient improvement. Moreover, he argued that what our death will be like depends largely on what we are dying from. The most important thing is that “dying well means living well with God. Preparation for death should be an everyday affair for the Christian, not in the sense that one is continually revising advance directives or wondering about potential moral conflicts, but in the daily effort to grow in intimacy with the Lord and to live one’s life well. Although planning for death with advance directives and making sure we will have good medical care and moral sensitivities are important, the essential part of dying well is living in Christ.”
Jesus’ death on the cross that we remember today on Good Friday is the exemplar of dying well. On the cross, Jesus offered His life to the Father and He abandons himself to the Father. Jesus knew that His mission was not to be an earthly King or a worldly leader, but to be a human being and to accept the consequences of being a human, with its defeats and failures. On the cross, Jesus accepts His failure and defeat. Jesus died as a loser in the world’s eyes because he did not establish a political movement or economic system or a mighty empire. Jesus offers His failure and defeat to His Father and His Father will transform this failure into the victory of the resurrection.
By suffering and dying on the cross, Christ took humility to the extreme. Nevertheless, by shedding his blood and dying, Christ reveals another valuable lesson for us. By imitating Christ, human beings will be able to learn to confront the fear of death. St. Augustine wrote in the City of God that “As He had given us a natural instinct to desire blessedness and immortality, He himself continuing to be blessed, but assuming mortality, by enduring what we are, taught us to despise it, that what we long for He might bestow upon us. But in order to your acquiescence in this truth, it is lowliness that is requisite, and to this it is extremely difficult to bend you.” Augustine believes that Christ, through his death on the cross, teaches us how to conquer our fear of death. Christ wants human beings to imitate him by taking the path of humility and death on a cross so that they will be able to confront the fear of death.
One of the causes for the human being’s fear of death is pride. In City of God, St. Augustine discusses the fall of the human race as originating from the pride of the corrupted will (voluntas mala). For Augustine, the ontological consequences of pride is that human beings seek to be self-sufficient, and they live according to the illusion that their own base drives to overpower the will of God. Modern people might imagine dying well with the thought of watching the sun set over Cape Cod Bay in the embrace and comfort of their children and friends. Or, during Augustine’s time, the Roman citizens considered death as something not only necessary but also something desirable for the glory and honor of Rome. St. Augustine points out that the hopes in glory are a mask for the fear of death as Roman heroes fear death in the guise of defeat or dishonor. Christ’s death via submission to humiliation, torture, and crucifixion demonstrates the full meaning of dying well. Christ’s agony on the cross expresses that the heroic humility of kenosis entails being emptied of all honor and glory.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, urges the person making the exercises to choose a state in life or make a decision by a variety of methods. One of the methods is to consider what one’s choices will look like “as if I were at the point of death.” Basically, St. Ignatius invited us to make choices from the perspective of the deathbed, with the hope that this method will help us to focus on the distinction between what is important for our lives with what is trivial, what is good, or what is evil. This method of decision-making might be too scary for some people, but it can certainly be tried during this crisis.
Jesus’s last words from the Cross were His prayers to the Father as he surrendered Himself. As we reflect and pray over those words, do these prayers bring consolation for us during this time of shelter in place or lock-down? Perhaps Jesus’s action of surrendering and humbling himself on the cross might help us to form our own prayer to the Father at this time of crisis with the coronavirus outbreak. What does the death of Jesus mean to you right now?