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April 5, 2007

Good Friday

Good Friday. Really? Good? A young man who commanded his disciples to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecuted them, to walk an extra mile with a load that was not one's own, whose only concrete crime was to disturb the peace, to disrupt the merchandise of the spiritual equivalent of today's pay day loan merchants was scourged with a whip that flayed his flesh, mocked, spit upon, and put to death by means of one of the most brutal forms of execution recorded in history. And we call it good?

Good, as in "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good?" Good, as in "Taste and see that the Lord is good?" Good, as in that which we are to cling to, just as fervently as we are to hate that which is evil?

In naming the holiday "good," the church has answered a resounding yes to all these questions. It is as good as the goodness of all creation in its unfallen glory, because it is what allows a return to that glory, and more. It is good, because the Lord, whose goodness of which we are invited to taste, has come more than half way, has tasted to its core the bitter fruit of the Fall, taking death upon himself so that we can once again come to him to taste of his sweetness. It is good, because the evil which we are to hate, which has stained our very souls, can be overcome because of this good day. We need no longer loathe ourselves, because our evil has been forgiven and, because of the resurrection, its power in our lives has been broken.

The opening shots of this post picture death as it affects the creatures of the Earth, the creatures of land and water and air. This is not the place to discuss the differences of theological opinion concerning life and death before the Fall, whether death was an essential part of the ecosystem, whether animals tore one another in predation, whether humans tore animals in predation, whether humans died physically. Those are important questions, to be sure, to which I am still developing answers. However, my very gut reaction to the pictures above confirms what has traditionally been the view of the church, that death is an anamoly, that things should not be so, that, at the very least, God did not intend humans to die through the ravages of disease and war. God certainly did not want humans to die spiritually through disobedience.

I would not post pictures of human suffering here, of someone ravaged by sickness or sorrow, of someone with their body broken by violence, because in so doing I would ratchet up the revulsion we experience from the pictures above to a higher level, to a level we have difficulty bearing. And if I chose to paint word pictures on my blog 24 hours a day, if every blogger in the world could blog 24 hours a day, we could not begin to find the words to describe the suffering of our world. Suffering from which, as my friend Meg reminds us, God does not always protect even his followers in this present age. These pictures, though, serve well to illustrate for us the stench of death, physical and spiritual. We get the point.

Even though I have not sorted out my questions, I essentially agree with C. S. Lewis, against worldviews that merely posit death as natural part of the world, that do not acknowledge, at the very least, that death has taken on added dimensions after the Fall.

"If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is part of God....Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, 'If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this is also God.' The Christian replies, 'Don't talk damned nonsense.' for Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world--that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on putting them right again."

And on Good Friday, God insists loudly in the paradox of his powerful Son, through whom the universe was made, going silently, as a quietly as a sheep before its shearers, to die. Good Friday is good, precisely because it is the hinge point of history, the day when death dies, when death, in Aslan's famous phrase, begins to work backward.

On the existensial level, though, Good Friday still does not seem very good, it is only the backward glance that makes it so. The value of the church year, which I only experience intermittently, is that it makes us go through the darkness before we see the goodness of the day. In services that focus on the death of Christ, some involving candles which are snuffed out leaving churches in darkness, we feel the despair the disciples must have felt. It is this experience of the feeling the darkness symbolically, which makes the hope of the coming light all the more special, when Christ will rise and death will be defeated. Christ has risen and the light of his kingdom has begun to shine. Yet even today sometimes we must endure darkness until we see the Glory of the Lord fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.' He who was seated on the throne said, 'I am making everything new!'

Finally, On Good Friday, Jesus practiced what he preached. He loved his enemies and persecutors, praying for their forgiveness. Indeed, he bore the suffering that made that forgiveness possible. And for us, who were enemies of God as a result of our sin, he carried our burdens without being asked to do so, to lengths we could never manage. And that makes this Friday very Good indeed.

Church Life and Theology | By jackdas | 6:28 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Heidi Vincent at April 6, 2007 7:53 AM

Posted by: Laura at April 6, 2007 9:23 AM

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