Good Friday

Easter, to the extent it retains any religious message, may be our day to celebrate resurrection and hope. But Good Friday may be the more important day.

To be sure, Christians almost certainly have the dates all wrong here, even when Passover and the Paschal holiday overlap. But that’s not the point. The message is the point, and relevant whether you’re Christian, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, or atheist. Or not quite sure.

Some of us hold that Jesus was in fact the Son of God, a co-equal person of the Trinity. Jews and Muslims reject the idea. Most have really not given it much thought. I’ve given it a lot of thought and for me, the jury is still out. But that’s not the point.

Whether you take it as absolute truth or a beautiful parable, the notion that the creator of the universe would in some fashion take upon himself the Everest of human depravity and pay the death penalty, not just as a man, but the rending of the fabric of the godhead, in order to restore divine fellowship with fallen man, is a staggering story. You can’t wrap your head around it, entirely, and you certainly can’t get your soul around it. It’s just too big, too sobering, too solemn.

Whether you accept that story, the heart of the Gospel, as settled truth, or a carefully woven fable, you can’t deny its impact as the ultimate story of grace. Mankind, on the one side, had no merit to offer; on the other side, deity had no downside, and was motivated only by mercy and grace. Some think each element of this equation is doctrine that must be accepted, and perhaps they’re right, but the impact, the gut punch, is in the idea alone.

You can’t face the Good Friday story without being humbled, without seeing those around us in a different light. If God’s Son would humbly face Calvary on our behalf, how can I not reach out a hand of reconciliation to my own foes? How can I nurse some perceived wound, or even a real one? How can I not find a way to share my lunch with someone who has none?

Let’s not miss the lesson.