The Day We Call Good Friday

On this day we commemorate the execution of a man who claimed to be the Messiah for the Jews.  For those who believed him and were watching at the time, it looked like just another bitterly disappointing tragedy.  Other would-be messiahs had risen to prominence and had been crushed and executed by the Romans, so the disappointed onlookers had little hope for any other outcome.

But what was unfolding was an event of cosmos shaking significance: evil was being defeated on that Friday and a new kingdom would be launched on Sunday. 

Reflecting on Jesus’ crucifixion, a concise and powerful depiction of the meaning of the cross is found in Brian McLaren’s book “Generous Orthodoxy”, page 105:

“Absorbing the worst that human beings can offer - crooked religiosity, petty political systems, individual betrayal, physical torture with whip and thorn and nail and hammer and spear - Jesus enters into the center of the thunderstorm of human evil and takes its full shock on the cross.  Our evil is brutally, unmistakably exposed, drawn into broad daylight, and judged - named and shown for what it is.  Then, having felt its agony and evil firsthand, in person, Jesus pronounces forgiveness and demonstrates that the grace of God is more powerful and expansive than the evil of humanity.  Justice and mercy kiss; judgment and forgiveness embrace.  From their marriage a new future is conceived.”

Excerpts from today’s meditation by Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr:

“Jesus hung in total solidarity with the pain of the world and the far too many lives on this planet that have been "nasty, lonely, brutish, and short.” After the cross, we know that God is not watching human pain, nor apparently always stopping human pain, as much as God is found hanging with us alongside all human pain. Jesus forever tells us that God is found wherever the pain is, which leaves God on both sides of every war, in sympathy with both the pain of the perpetrator and the pain of the victim, with the excluded, the tortured, the abandoned, and the oppressed since the beginning of time. I wonder if we even like that. There are no games of moral superiority left. Yet this is exactly the kind of Lover and the universal Love that humanity needs.

“What else could possibly give us a cosmic and final hope? This is exactly how Jesus redeemed the world "by the blood of the cross.” It was not some kind of heavenly transaction, or "paying a price" to God, as much as a cosmic communion with all that humanity has ever loved and ever suffered. If he was paying any price it was for the hard and resistant skin around our souls.”

Gives us lots to think about . . .

But, wait a minute, Sunday’s coming!