Our own union with God can be weakened or destroyed, not only by an undue love of worldly things, which itself is really sinful, but also by those things which we more readily and easily recognise as actual sins.  Let us make up our minds now that whenever the call of death may come, it may not find us in the truly calamitous state of unrepented sin.

It is the danger and the fear of such a plight that lies behind the petition in the Litany, “…from sudden death, good Lord, deliver us”.  A lingering death, that provides the opportunity to make one’s peace with God, can be more merciful in the end than to pass away quietly but unexpectedly in one’s sleep.

Nevertheless in the midst of life we are in death, and if we should by any chance find ourselves in grievous sin, let us see to it that we lose no time in confessing it and gaining God’s forgiveness by which alone our disrupted relationship with him can be restored.

We have been thinking of Our Lord dying on the Cross for us, and he still pleads today as he pleaded then, “Father forgive them”.  If therefore Good Friday means anything it means that we must go to Our Lord in penitence and lay our sins at the foot of his Cross.  He knows.  He knows all our sins and everything about us.  And having done that, let us resolve that henceforth ourselves and our lives shall be his for all eternity.