Pope Leo XIV presides over Ash Wednesday Mass, marking the start of Catholic Lent, inside the Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome, on Feb. 18.Gregorio Borgia/The Associated Press
Lorna Dueck is a host of Canadian Bible Society’s Scripture Untangled podcast.
A holiday at the beginning of spring is well timed when we are aching to put winter behind us. And when that holiday ends the workweek early, it’s easy to call this day Good Friday. Many Christians, however, will spend some of the day being mournful. Good Friday, ironically, has a deep connection to guilt. For the religious soul, Good Friday is about our personal and collective inability to be good people, and the day is set aside to reflect on the tortured death of Jesus Christ as the cost paid to restore humanity from sin.
Discussion of sin is usually tucked away in biblical texts, so I was surprised to see this spring’s Oscar buzz for a film named Sinners. This fan favourite that was nominated for Best Picture is a vampire horror movie that Ryan Coogler, the film’s creator, told us in his press tour is “about identity, as my movies always are, and how people see themselves, but also what people do.” I don’t enjoy vampire movies, but I did see the film that beat Sinners out for Best Picture: One Battle After Another. While many films include moral transgressions, this one – with murder, racism, theft and more – was so stacked with them that it made me think sin as a topic is clearly in the zeitgeist.
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Taken out of the theatre and brought to bear in real life, sinners is a word that implies guilt. And the ways that guilt can transform us is something aptly described by Dr. Chris Moore in The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal. Dr. Moore, a Dalhousie University professor of neuroscience and psychology, uses science to explain this but also a personal experience.
More than 40 years ago, after an evening of partying and drinking, Dr. Moore, then a second-year psychology student, joined a group of friends in taking a car that wasn’t theirs, and he fell asleep in the passenger seat. When he awoke, bloodied and blinded by police lights, he discovered their careless behaviour had caused the death of a student cyclist and injured several others.
Dr. Moore writes about how, while he was in the hospital, his parents, who were Catholics, came in and told him he had done extraordinarily stupid and harmful things. His parents then went on to speak of forgiveness towards him for causing a young man’s death and for bringing shame upon their family. Friends of the dead cyclist also gathered at Dr. Moore’s hospital bedside and explained that because of their belief in Jesus, who died to forgive all sin, they too felt they should forgive him. Jailed for three months for his crime, Dr. Moore says being extended forgiveness gave him a sense of relief that helped him move forward in his own life.
“Guilt is an emotion, so it’s a piece of our psychology. The purpose of guilt from a psychological point of view is to make us do better in our relationships,” Dr. Moore told me in an interview.
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Guilt, he believes, “is a complex mix of more basic emotions. One of them is anxiety over doing something to harm a relationship that we care about. A second emotion is compassion, or empathy for the person we may have hurt. And a third is a form of self-directed anger, or remorse, where we feel angry at ourselves for having done something to hurt the other person that we care about.”
We can all think of a person who feels no guilt about something they have done wrong, or a person who has abandoned a relationship because they no longer care. Not every mind has been successfully taught by loving parents or friends to be sensitive to another person’s pain. Dr. Moore reminds us that courts of law sometimes try people who feel no guilt, the worst of whom we call psychopaths.
The believer in Good Friday’s religious symbolism connects deeply to their own behaviours of guilt, and it is on the death of Christ that a Christian will reflect and pray. A terrible price was paid in a divine family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to redirect the human race away from sin.
The earliest writings of Christianity teach: “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). That is why this Friday holiday is simply called Good Friday; we all need the gift of forgiveness.