“What’s so good about it?” is the question that almost every child, once learning about the nature of the day, will ask. The use of “good” may be another one of those unhappy mistakes in translation. The earliest recorded us of the word comes from “The South English Legendary”, circa 1290 C.E. The idea is that it is good because, in spite of the torture and death of Jesus, something positive came out of it on Easter morning. Another idea is that the original word for good meant “holy” or “sacred” or “God’s” Friday. To think of this day as good in the usual way is a perverse twist of theology that does nothing, I think, for anyone. It just makes God seem cruel.
For me, this is the most challenging day of the year for Christians because it is so cruel. Sure, Jesus couldn’t have been raised from the dead without dying, and it is obvious from the life of Jesus that nobody who did what He did would get away with it unscathed. John the Baptist also died for telling the truth to power, as did many other individuals throughout human history. Soldiers and police officers and firefighters and teachers put their lives on the line for others regularly, often paying that ultimate price. That’s why we see what they do as heroic. It isn’t the dying that makes Jesus so different, although this level of sacrifice is rare (which is what the Apostle Paul says about it in Romans 5). The difference is that God responded to His murder by saying death isn’t the final answer. Which means to me that the death of Jesus was not part of the plan – bringing the Kingdom of God into reality was. Jesus came to bring life, not death. People decided to get in the way.
Which makes the death of Jesus even more troubling. If God didn’t do it, that means that people did. People murdered God. It wasn’t one group, but a conspiracy of individuals from different groups who set Him up so the government could kill Him. And even though most of us were raised on a theology that placed Jesus’s death firmly on some long-term plan that God cooked up before we even existed, the very idea that God would kill God’s self is antithetical to a life-affirming, abundance-offering Deity. What we really remember every year is how wrong people can be. How misguided and selfish and petty people can behave. Maybe we should call this day “Bad” or “Tragic” or “What is wrong with people?” Friday; that might get closer to the point of what really happened.
Whatever you call this day, please don’t ignore the depth of it. Jumping from Christmas or Palm Sunday right to Easter loses the gravity of the progression through the Christian year. Until you have struggled with the frustration of Good Friday, I don’t think you can really see just how amazing Easter is. See you soon …
Prayer – Remind us of the whole story, God of the holy, as we struggle with You today. Amen.
Today’s art is called “Good Friday” by Diego Rivera.