GOOD FRIDAY.

Near Mobile, Alabama, there was a railroad bridge that spanned a big bayou. The date was September 22, 1993.  It was a foggy morning, just before daybreak, when a tugboat accidentally pushed a barge into the bayou.  The drifting barge slammed into the river bridge.  In the darkness no one could see the extent of the damage, but someone on the tugboat radioed the Coast Guard. Minutes later, an Amtrak train, the Sunset Limited, reached the bridge as it traveled from Los Angeles to Miami.  Unaware of the damage, the train crossed the bridge at 70 mph. There were 220 passengers on board.  As the weight of the train broke the support, the bridge gave away.  Three locomotive units and the first four of the train’s eight passenger cars fell into the alligator infested bayou.  In the darkness, the fog was thickened by fire and smoke.  Six miles from land, the victims were potential food for the aroused alligators. Helicopters were called in to help rescue the victims. Rescuers were able to save 163 persons. But one rescue stands out. Gary and Mary Jane Chancey

were waiting in the railcar with their eleven-year-old daughter Andrea. When the car went into the bayou and began to fill rapidly with water, there was only one thing they could do. They pushed their young daughter through the window into the hands of a rescuer, and then succumbed to their watery death.  Their sacrificial love stands out especially because their daughter was imperfect by the world's standards. She was born with cerebral palsy and needed help with even the most routine things.  But she was precious to her parents.  

Many years ago the late Fr. Guido Arguelles S.J. wrote a reflection on the passion and death of the Lord, entitled “Scar or Star”:

           Jesus Christ indeed is a Superstar,

                  upon the cross he was super-scarred.

           The thief on the left saw the scar. 

                  The thief on the right saw the star. . . 

           The ugly child that to a stranger is a scar 

                   is to its mother – her star!

           Those who love see stars. 

                  Those who do not, see scars.

Our life too, like Andrea’s, are imperfect – our lives are filled with mistakes, sin and helplessness. But we are still precious to God – so precious that He sacrificed his Son Jesus to save us. He allowed him to die on the Cross, the most ignominious death. And he elevated the Cross, the sign of shame and helplessness into sign of victory and honor.

Christian faith is not the reverential relationship to a distant and even abstract God, we know nothing about, but the adhesion to a Person, true man like us and, at the same time, true God. The Invisible one became flesh of our flesh and assumed to be a man until death, a death on the Cross. But, it was a death accepted as a ransom for us all, redeeming death, death that brings us life.