“GOOD” FRIDAY

APRIL 2, 2021 – When I was young, I couldn’t figure out what was good about “Good Friday.”  From my limited perspective, it was all bad—first the betrayal, then the taunts, then the crown of three-inch thorns pressed onto his head so hard . . . A-a-h-h-h! . . . then spikes hammered through his . . . A-A-A-A-A-H-H-H! . . . then death, darkness and earthquakes. Where was the good in any of that story (for mature audiences only)? No. “Good” Friday made as much sense as “Monday” Thursday—or at least as I understood people to be calling “Maundy Thursday,” the day before Good Friday.

Also, I found utterly confounding, Jesus’s refusal to defend himself. “Speak up, Jesus . . . for crying out loud!” I wanted to yell. “What’s with going quiet just when you need to talk back loud and clear?!”

Without a satisfactory explanation from my elders, I resolved that “Good Friday” was all about spin—calling something the exact opposite of what it really was to avoid having to call it . . . what it was.

Be that as it scripturally, doctrinally, and theologically may, the whole scene is now beginning to acquire a degree of cogency, believe it or not, inside my admittedly limited cognitive processes. I now view the entire play, from Judas’s betrayal to the questioning by the Sanhedrin to Peter’s denial to the appearances before Herod and Pilate to the Road to Calvary to the . . . A-A-A-A-H-H-H-H-H! . . . crucifixion itself, as allegory for humankind’s pride, cruelty and worst trait of all: contempt for creation.

Whether God “exists” is to me a pedantic, even pointless question. Given our limited intellectual capacity, we can’t grasp a full definition of “God”—which is why psychology and imagination take over and attempt to fill the void. The result among people of the Christian tradition is Jesus as Messiah and the Son of God—a figure that is both human, and thus comprehensible, and divine, and thus reassuringly omniscient and omnipotent in the face of our ignorance and impotence.

What matters to me, and what I glean from the story of (not so) “Good Friday” is that it acknowledges in very timeless, human terms that “we the people,” whether as evil doers (Judas), weaklings (Peter), rabble (crowd scene) or power-wielders (Sanhedrin; Roman rulers), are so full of ourselves, we’ll kill the innocent, kill the defenseless, kill even . . . the Son of omniscient, omnipotent God, which is really bad, because the son of God is, well, getting pretty darn close to . . . strike that; it’s the same thing as killing God; no, strike that because it’s even worse, because killing the child of a parent is worse than killing the parent!

In any event, killing creation doesn’t go down well with the forces of nature, as the unholy darkness and shifts of tectonic plates hammer home.

As the scene closes, we’re left to wonder . . . what’s our way out of our “badness”? Look! See! In the darkness there’s revelation: the story of Good Friday was assembled, preserved, transmitted by our self-awareness. Therein lies our hope.

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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson