Blessed Good Friday to you my brothers and sisters in Christ. Today is the day that Christ our Lord, our Savoir and redeemer, died on the cross. Yes, his death, Jesus Christ's death, was a very sorrowful death. A man who did no wrong, a man who only spoke truth, a man who healed all who came to him, even rose the dead for those who had faith, a man who was compassionate, caring, loving, and intimate, the man Jesus Christ, while also being fully God, died by the most gruesome method possible. He was condemned by his own people, denied and abandoned by his best friends, scourged brutally to the point of extreme pain, his back and front, forced to carry a 300-pound splintery cross, while wearing a crown of sharp thorns that pierced his skull, and then finally after carrying the cross up a hill, all the while being jeered and mocked, he had nails driven through the nerves in his wrists and feet, and was crucified. Then, after enduring that for a good six hours, from 9 AM to 3 PM, Jesus Christ gave up his spirit and died. All who knew him intimately were sorrowful, sad, and miserable. His death on this day, Good Friday, is a very sad one, a death that even shakes the most habitual sinner. But why did Jesus Christ choose to endure all this? Why did Christ our Lord endure such pain and misery for us?

Here is a great and effective visual guide to understanding and seeing firsthand the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, which took place on this day, Good Friday, around 2000 years ago. The whole film of The Passion of the Christ is right here, and it is an excellent guide on knowing exactly what Christ our Lord had to go through, for our salvation.

You have to turn subtitles on.

Yes, indeed Christ's passion is very painful to watch, but it is important to know that Jesus Christ himself chose to endure all of this for us. And the big question is why.

And the answer to that is simply because God, being The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit, loves humanity, so much that his love is immeasurable and impossible to measure the full weight of his love for humanity. God saw that we needed help, for we had no life, for we were not with God, for we were stuck in sin. Sin we committed, and sin separated us from God. Even if we tried our best to not sin and did not sin for a time, we still had death to overcome, an insurmountable wall that separates us from God. And even if we did not have death to worry about, Satan still had a hold on us, because he is the ruler of this world. Therefore, we were all chained to three masters, which are sin, death, and Satan, with his fallen angels, otherwise known as demons. All these masters separate humanity from God, who is life. God who created heaven and earth is obviously the source of life, but humanity was cut off from the source of life, which meant death, and not just that, but death for a very long time until we get connected back to the source of life.

In the infinite wisdom of God, this is a proverb that rings true in everything: Do not overcome evil with evil, but overcome evil with good and love. When evil is pitted against evil, nothing is overcome, but only more evil is created. Sometimes we do this too. When something evil happens to us, we do something wrong in return to make up for it. But this only makes and creates more evil in the end. The only way to overcome evil, as the Creator shows us on Good Friday, is to overcome it with Love. Since evil and love are two opposite things, only one is going to win out. God's Love is the most powerful force in the known universe, and so therefore if we have the Love of God in our hearts, we can overcome all evil with this love. Christ himself overcame the most horrid and gruesome evils by his endurance, patience, obedience to his Father in Heaven, but most crucially of all, his intimate Love for the Father and for all of humanity. He knew that we would not have life without God, so he decided to give us that life once again, by overcoming all the forces of evil and darkness with all the powers of God's Love and God's Light. 

By dying and suffering on the Cross, Christ took upon himself all the sins of the world, all the sins of the faithful, all the sins of the confessors, all sins in the past, present, and future, and by his death on the Cross, he being the Son of the Living God, destroyed death by his death, absolved and eviscerated sin by taking upon all the sin of the world and dying as a sacrifice to absolve all sin by his death, and so therefore making all sin die with his death, and he destroyed the powers of Satan by his crucifixion, because now all what it takes to be free from Satan's grip is to look at Christ Crucified with faith, and by the Grace of the Holy Spirit, the powers of sin and death are overthrown within the person, therefore freeing the person from the yoke of Satan.

Before all that had to happen however, he had to endure a lot of pain, over a long period of time. But because of the Love of God, Christ still overcame the greatest test, and brought to humanity the Way to the Father, the Truth of the Father, and the Life from the Father. By Christ's death on this day, Good Friday, we are cleansed of our sin, we are free from death, and Satan has no power over us anymore. By Christ's death, God's Love and Grace was poured out to all of us, and Christ's Passion gives us strength to overcome every obstacle, every evil, every malicious thought and deed with only one weapon: God's Love. And once we have God's Love, we have true and living communion with God. And it is possible through the Grace of the Holy Spirit.

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May the Grace of the Holy Trinity be with you always my brothers and sisters in Christ. Amen.