Thoughts for Good Friday
Date: April 05, 2007
Time: 5:23am est

On Good Friday, Christians celebrate the redemptive passion of Jesus Christ, the "suffering servant" who embraced the enigma of human affliction and agony as a means for obtaining our eternal salvation.

As a Christian, I have always believed that at the heart of his passion lay Christ's loving determination to unite himself to every human person who suffers, especially the most vulnerable.

As this Good Friday approaches, I find myself thinking of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters in the human family. The endless images of human carnage in Iraq provoke in us a seething frustration and something beyond outrage. Elsewhere, particularly on the African continent, unconscionable human atrocities go on. and on. without a substantive and decisive response from the world community.

Then there are the scores of those other voiceless and vulnerable members of our human community, who comprise both extremes of the range of human life-at its very beginnings (whether through natural conception, in vitro fertilization, or-soon, it is to be feared-human cloning), or at life's end.

These days it's not easy to maintain membership in the club of human persons. As our culture tolerates ever more aggressive attempts to exclude some of us from the club, all of us become more vulnerable. Frankly, I have found myself in a state of disbelief lately just considering our current situation: we have Princeton University professor Peter Singer who entertains the moral acceptability of breeding children for spare parts; on the political front, we have been struggling for over three decades to uphold the moral significance of one simple truth, namely, that we were all once human embryos; and, yet, on the Tuesday after Easter, our Senate will debate whether we should use federal tax dollars to fund the further creation and destruction of human embryos for research purposes. And the list goes on.

The first Good Friday of course, no matter how dark, did not extinguish hope-hope that even from the depths of human senselessness (as the creature crucified his Creator), we would yet one day recover our sanity. That recovery, of course was the work of God's grace. So on this Good Friday, let us together continue to hope in God's grace, that we, as a human family, will yet have the sanity to love, protect, venerate and defend all human persons at every stage of their lives.

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