Happy Good Friday!
Blessed Good Friday? That sounds more appropriate. It is a very solemn day, after all, as we recognize (celebrate?) the brutal torture and crucifixion of God come down as Man. Can it really be a good day when we’re talking about the murder of any innocent life, let alone someone perfect and all-loving?
Strangely, yes.
So, for anyone tuning in not familiar with the term Good Friday, it’s effectively the culmination of the Lenten season. We spent all of Lent getting ready for this weekend: Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. On Easter Sunday, we celebrate Christ’s conquering of death through His resurrection. Yay! Happy day! Clearly Easter is a time of celebration!
And for Jesus to rise from the dead, He first had to become one of the dead. He had to die to rise. This makes sense logically. But why did He have to rise from the dead in the first place?
The short answer: to save us from ourselves.
In a previous series, we looked at the seven deadly sins and the virtues that combat them. Our working definition for sin is anything that turns our focus away from God. What we didn’t deeply discuss was the impact of sin on our lives. We didn’t go into how our choices to sin impact not only our relationship with God but also our relationships with those whom we love and the relationship we have with ourselves. I’m not going to short shrift this discussion by attempting to squish it in with the Good Friday discussion, so here’s the one-liner…
Sin hurts all of it, everything, everyone, cutting us off from our true, amazing selves as well as God and the people we love.
We mess up sometimes. That’s not a shocker, is it? It also probably comes as no surprise that messing up hurts the people we care about. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take a simple example: if you stab your friend’s hand while doing a knife trick, your friend probably won’t trust you with sharp objects for a while. Physical pain is a pretty solid deterrent for dangerous behavior because most people dislike being in physical pain.
In a similar way, when we sin, we withdraw ourselves from God. When we sin, we pull away from others, even the person we want to be. God doesn’t want us to feel isolated and unloved! God loves us more than we can begin to comprehend! God always has His merciful hand extended for guidance to lead us back to Him. God is merciful love.
God is also just. He abounds in mercy, but so, too, does He abound in justice. Mercy and justice are two sides of the same coin: something cannot be merciful if justice has not been properly applied. For a penalty to be merciful, the decision must first be rendered on whether the action was wrong, how much harm it caused, and the proper range of recourse. A two-year prison sentence might be considered lenient, forgiving, and merciful for some crimes and extremely harsh for others. Justice must be recognized for mercy to have an opportunity.
Justice, in this case, condemns us all to death for our sins. God did everything for us, and yet, through original sin, we turned away. We decide (on a recurring basis) that either we know better than God or that God doesn’t love us as much as He should. We decide, for whatever reason, that we are better off going about life without following the instructions God set for us.
Bad decisions happen.
God constantly calls us back.
So we try again. We decide, okay, that wasn’t the best idea after all. Maybe if I trust God in this one issue, we can move forward. Good on you! That’s awesome! God extended His merciful hand, and you are trying again. Marvelous!
Justice must still be paid.
For the wrongs we commit, and for the wrongs that all of humanity commits, there is a penalty. We owe everything and failed to give it, and the penalty for that is death.
But God wants to save us.
God, in His perfect justice, knew that the blood price had to be paid. God, in His perfect mercy, offers His hand to any who will return to Him. And God, in His perfect wisdom, knew precisely how to both extract justice and grant mercy.
God gave us His only begotten Son, Jesus, to die an excruciating death in our place. Jesus suffered a torturous day of sentencing, beatings, mockery, bloodletting, abandonment, and every kind of pain imaginable. And then He died. Jesus died on the cross that first Good Friday so that we can return to Him and the Father.
Today’s sorrow comes from the death of Jesus.
Today’s joy is that God loves us so much that He decided to take our place on that cross.
Remember on this solemn day that there is still joy. We know that Jesus rises on the third day. We know that because Jesus died and rose on the third day, there is hope. There is hope. There is hope in every difficulty, in every dark alley, in every agonizing moment, in every forced half-smile, in every wince, in every fear. In every single situation, there is hope because my Savior lived, died, and rose from the dead to guide me back to Him. That is how much God loves me, how much God loves you. God loves each of us to the point of accepting death in the most painful manner possible to just give us a path in case we choose to return to Him.
Boundless love is always something to be joyful for.
Happy Good Friday.
