Surround yourself with Good Friday friends

Fr Jason Murphy has an important message about the type of friends you should surround yourself with in his latest column Let the Busy World Be Hushed...

I never pass much remarks on the lad who claps you on the back when you’re on the crest of a wave for it's easy to be a friend of someone when they’re successful and doing well. Everyone wants a shake of the hand or a word in the ear when you’re popular and suiting others. You see it time and time again, carried shoulder high on a County Final day or come Election day when the crowds gather in adulation. But the words often cited in footballing parlance that "you’re only as good as your last match" are a caveat to those who let praise go to their heads.

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster", as the poet Kipling so eloquently wrote, "and treat those two impostors just the same" you’ll have garnered a lot, for those who praise and lavish adulation upon you are often those who run to the shadows or walk the other side of the street when your lustre fades and you’re down on your luck. They can be among those who ‘like’ comments on social media or add to the pages of vitriol when you trip and make a mistake, when it is you are lying flat on your face in the sand.

Some people are fortunate for their mistakes are hidden, they’re well covered up, they can get up and brush themselves off and, though grazed a little, they can walk on holding their heads high as if nothing has ever happened.

But, for others, their mistake is public and, though once they might have been carried shoulder high, their so-called supporters are now nowhere to be seen.

They are few and far between, those who stand by you in your hour of need, when shame and gossip shadow you.

People with back bone are usually not those who stand six foot tall or appear on County Final days or Election winning nights.

People with back bone are those whom you hardly notice, who rarely speak at all, the quiet and the unassuming, the ones you have befriended over time.

They are the ones who emerge from the shadows when you need them most of all.

Throughout this Holy Week you will meet them as each day passes as Christ moves from death to Life. On Palm Sunday, the crowds gather in adulation, they even lay their cloaks before him on the street, it’s the feast day of backslappers, looking over his shoulder to see if there’s anyone more popular coming along.

Lads that have interest in no-one only themselves and the extra bit of kudos they can garner from they’re being there.

We see it in the Garden of Gethsemenea when the forty pieces of silver are exchanged and come the Last Supper and the dipping of the finger with the promises of loyalty in perfusion that are made. But by midday on Good Friday the whole shooting lot of them, despite their promises and adulation, are long gone.

They are nowhere to be seen when Christ falls three times in the sand in the sea of spittle and abuse when a man must be forced from the crowd to help him carry his heavy burden. In fact the ones who laid their cloaks before him are now the same ones who are stripping him to skin bare.

If it were today they’d be posting videos galore on social media and giving the thumbs up to every lash he bore.

It’s the quiet ones, the ones that got very little limelight, in fact the ones who were often scorned and looked down upon, who stand by as he is nailed to the cross and, for the most part, they are women. The Veronicas, the women of Jerusalem, Mary Magdelene who was derided, his mother Mary and Mary the mother of Clopas, only one man amongst them all, John, the quiet one, the one whom Jesus loved.

There are no back slappers around as his lone figure hangs forlorn, battered and abused on the hill of the cross, no crowds singing Hosanna in adulation, just the meagre few who have always been there throughout his journey and it is they, these women and the disciple John, who Christ allows to be the first to see him on that Easter day.

As we journey through this week we place ourselves in the midst of the crowd and we might ask am I a Palm Sunday follower or a Good Friday friend?

Am I the person who waves the Palm branch in adulation and basks in the limelight of his popularity or are we there when all others have turned away?

In a time of trouble, let us be to others a Good Friday friend for I think it is they we’d like to have beside us when it is we who trip and fall face down in the sand.