We often meditate on what God says: on what he says to us in Sacred Scripture; on what he says to us in and through the Magisterium of his Church.

But on Good Friday, it’s not what God says that should strike us, it’s God’s silence.

In fact, here’s an interesting irony: People often complain about the things the Lord has said: "Love your enemies"; "Forgive, as you have been forgiven"; "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect;" "Do not even look at another person with lust in your heart." These, admittedly, are hard sayings. And yet, as disturbing as these commands can sometimes be, they are not as upsetting to us as God’s silence is.

In his book, Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his horrific experience in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. After watching so many of his people being butchered by the Nazis, he wondered where God was. In reflecting back on it all he wrote, "For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless his name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank him for?"

As Elie Wiesel knows, the silence of God can be most disturbing.

Terrorists bomb the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and God is—in many respects—silent.

Children are abused; babies are murdered in the womb, and God is silent.

Relatives get sick and die; bad things happen to good people, and God is silent.

The silence of God is something all of us are very familiar with.

But so was Jesus Christ! That, we must never, ever forget. Even though he was the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made man, in his human nature Jesus Christ knew the silence of God that every human being knows in his or her earthly life. The Bible indicates that on Good Friday, as he hung on the Cross dying for our sins, he experienced such intense distress and emptiness that he cried out, "My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?"—which are the very first words of the 22^nd Psalm.

Jesus cried out to heaven in terrible agony; and from heaven there came—nothing. There was no audible response from the Father (as there had been at his baptism and transfiguration); there was only silence. Deafening silence.

Meditate tonight on Jesus’ experience of God’s silence; it can help you deal with your own.

No doubt our Savior knew the psalms by heart—all 150 of them—and I’m quite confident that he prayed the rest of Psalm 22 as he hung there dying—if not with his lips, at the very least in his heart. And if you’re familiar with that lengthy psalm, you know that it ends not with despair, but with incredible joy.

So Jesus did receive an answer of sorts to his question—in spite of his Father’s silence. But it was not an answer that was evident in his immediate human experience: he was, after all, still in excruciating pain! The answer he received in the rest of Psalm 22 was an answer of hope—the hope of final vindication and a future resurrection.

And so it may be—at times—for us. The answer we seek from God in the midst of our crosses may not come in our immediate experience. Like Jesus, we may cry out, "Why?" and still continue to suffer. But the experience of Jesus on Good Friday teaches us that there will always be an answer for us, an answer that we can receive in hope:

--in the hope of perfect justice;

--in the hope of perfect mercy;

--in the hope of the resurrection of the dead;

--in the hope of perfect peace;

--in the hope of that eternal life in which all these realities will be experienced.