It Closes the Distance

Why did there need to be a Good Friday?

One man's reasoning:

“We hear Christ tell the scribes and the Pharisees that he has not come for the well but for the sick, and he gives a list that is confirmed on every page of the Gospel: the blind, the deaf, the leprous, the palsied and the lame. These are the ones whom the disciples are to recruit by the wayside; it is through them that Christ makes his way with one miracle after another.

… To read the Bible literally, one would even think that God’s love for us increases in direct proportion to our shortcomings, that he is grateful to us for this cross that we ask him to bear because it closes the distance from him to us. … ”

-- Paul Claudel, d. 1955, from “I Believe in God, A Meditation on the Apostles’ Creed.”

The painting above, "Jesus in the Sepulchre" or "Jésus dans le sépulcre," is by James Tissot. It is the property of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.