It could be easy to overlook perhaps the most important part of the Good Friday Liturgy. It is not the Veneration of the Cross (which is optional, although profoundly moving) but the praying of the Solemn Collects. I have been thinking about the Solemn Collects quite a lot this year.
While I would never be so bold as to say that the age in which we live is more desperate, violent, cruel, or wayward than any in the past, it is nevertheless an age which is indeed desperate, violent, cruel, and wayward. Reading the daily news can suck the life out of us. We are living through a war that has been treated by some as little more than a video game, demeaning the image of God in the people whom it affects. Some who call themselves Christians claim to wage holy wars against other religions, even though Christianity is specifically a religion founded on love of enemies. Tribalism is on the rise. I do not need to name all the hideousness of our times to you. But given all this chaos and mess, I keep turning to the Solemn Collects of the Good Friday liturgy because there is a truth there that survives the worst distortions of blasphemous assertions.
As I mentioned in last week’s message, these collects are the theological and soteriological moment in which we move into the place that Christ has been as the Great High Priest. We are called to be a priestly people, interceding for the salvation of the world as Christ himself did. We pray for all sorts of situations and peoples. We pray especially for our enemies, not consigning them to our own attempts at hasty and ill-founded “justice.” We pray for them so that God will care, love, and protect them by bringing them to repentance and amendment of life. And we pray that God will bring us to repentance if we have wronged others. In the Solemn Collects, we pray for others before ourselves, finally concluding by asking “for the grace of a holy life” so that “we may be accounted worthy to enter into the fullness of the joy of our Lord.” The shape of the Solemn Collects is Christ-like. We intercede for others first. We die to self so that others might rise to newness of life.
If you examine the Solemn Collects, you will find that many, if not most, of the petitions are for situations caused by human sin and wrongdoing, or for people who are still actively living as an affront to love, justice, truth, and mercy. The petitions are evidence that there is much brokenness in our world. There is evil. There is sin. And yet. . . these things are not the final word. We must acknowledge them and name them, of course. We must repent for our own misdoings and past wrongs as the Church. Still, God finds us in the disorder of our lives. Something deeper, a glimmer of hope, is there among the rubble, and it emerges in fits and starts on Good Friday but shines clearly on Easter Day.
And so, the Solemn Collects end with one of the most beautiful collects in the prayer book, a collect that we pray not only on Good Friday but at the Great Vigil of Easter and at ordinations (time is not linear!). It is a collect that plumbs the profundity of salvation. It is a collect that never fails to give me goosebumps when I pray it.
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Yes, even on Good Friday, even in the midst of war, national chaos, and political turmoil, even as we suffer and toil through the inconstancies of life, God is carrying out the plan of salvation. God is raising up those things we have cast down in disrespect. God is making new those things that we have sullied with malaise and lack of care. God is bringing us and the whole world to salvation. This is the mystery of Easter, which we celebrate every day of our lives, even on this Good Friday. And on Saturday night, the first strains of our joyous acclamations of this everlasting hope will ring out, pealing like bells in the darkness of the night.
For those of you who despair, for those of you who suffer, for those of you who are beaten down, know that the God who came among us as one of the poor and as one who suffers is still carrying out the plan of salvation. This plan includes you. And this plan is intended for the transformation of your enemies, too. It includes all who are willing to turn back to the light, back to Christ, the one whom God raised from the dead and in whom all things become new. May God bless you this Easter.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle