The sorrowful mysteries of the Holy Rosary is the perfect place to understand Good Friday. They reflect on Christ’s spiritual crisis in the garden as He awaits His arrest and crucifixion. We are asked to contemplate His back being scourged, His poor head being abused with a crown of thorns, the painful process of dragging a cross, which weighed from 100 to 300 pounds, to finally having iron spikes driven through His flesh and bones. 

Crucifixion was one of the most gruesome deaths concocted by mankind. It caused the maximum of pain and allowed for the greatest humiliation. It assured its victim would die slowly. The Cross could have easily remained an icon of evil. 

In the first several centuries after Christ’s death, the Cross was considered so morbid it was akin to displaying an image of a beheading on a wall or door. 

Two excellent books tackle this contradiction between an instrument of torture and what became a sign love and hope, pointing the way from death to eternal life. Both are perfect for the Lenten season.

Death on a Friday Afternoon, by the late Fr. Richard Neuhaus, and the recently published Healing Wounds, by Norwegian Bishop Erik Varden, each ask readers to spend time contemplating what happened on that awful day more than 2,000 years ago. Both urge readers not to turn away from the Cross, but rather to soak in all its terrible beauty of Christ’s sacrifice for us.

Dwelling on Christ’s suffering, which He accepted for the redemption of our sins, may be the best way to fully understand how much He loved us, both authors believe.

“Good Friday is the key to understanding what Dante called ‘the love that moves the sun and all the other stars,’ ” wrote Neuhaus, the founder of First Things magazine.

Death on a Friday Afternoon is a series of meditations on the Seven Last Words From the Cross: Father forgive them for they know not what they do, today you shall be with me in paradise, woman behold thy son … behold thy mother, my God why have you forsaken me, I thirst, it is finished, and into your hands I commend my spirit.

The events of Good Friday, Neuhaus believed, were of cosmic proportions, echoing through all time: “This is the axis mundi, the centre upon which the cosmos turns.” 

He goes on: “The way of the Christian life is cruciform. Jesus did not suffer and die in order that we need not suffer and die but in order that our suffering and death might be joined in His redemptive victory.

“The Christian way is not one of avoidance but of participation in the suffering of Christ, which encompasses not only our own suffering but the suffering of the whole world.”

Neuhaus’ message is to avoid hurrying to Easter Sunday and the glorious Resurrection. Rather, make sure to spend time in front of the Crucifix as a way of showing gratitude for such a selfless act of atonement, recalling that Christ was without sin.

While Neuhaus concentrated on the last words of Christ, Healing Wounds takes a different approach, one also urging acknowledgement of Christ’s sacrifice. Healing Wounds asks us to meditate on all of Christ’s wounds: to His feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart and face. 

Like Neuhaus, Varden senses a kind of squeamishness among Catholics in contemplating the awful pain that Jesus suffered. 

“There is a tendency in Christian devotion to prettify, even idealize, wounds,” Varden writes. 

Varden is also the host of a new podcast called Desert Fathers in a Year. In the podcasts he connects us to the early Church and how the ideas that came out of the desert are still important today.

Like Neuhaus, Varden sees Christ crucified not as one event among many, but as a pivotal moment that reaches through all time, to today and tomorrow and beyond.

“Whatever our distance in space and time from Jesus’ passion, we are complicit in its enactment. The nails stand for our iniquity: ‘He was pierced for our faults,’ we read in the prophet. For their sake he must suffer.”