Grateful for Good Friday
Yesterday I bought a glittery cross necklace at Target. It’s the ultimate American Christian thing to do, right, to feel moved by Passion Week and go buy a bauble to recognize it? We were talking with some friends the other night about how we wear and celebrate an instrument of torture – “how do I teach my three-year-old about that?” one friend wondered.
We do not celebrate the pain of Good Friday, though; not really. Good Friday is only good because of the outrageous love it portrays. But it would simply be foolish, misguided love if we did not require Jesus’ sacrifice in order to be right with God. If we don’t need a Savior then Jesus was just a chump to took unnecessary punishment for a bunch of nice people who only deserved a hand-slap anyway.
Good Friday is good because Jesus was not a good teacher or a misguided fall-guy. He is God, he paid the price for our sin, and he rose from the grave.
I was thinking about the inherent ugliness of Passion Week, despite my glittery remembrance. We, as Christians, are asked to remember a week of drama and death and betrayal. What does this mean for us?
It means that God knows relationship is messy, in the truest sense of the word. It means that we can love one another deeply because God loved us first. It means that only when we walk through our own messy, dramatic seasons can we emerge on the other side with grace, understanding and patience for each other – acknowledging that we will fail but we will keep walking.
Today I’m grateful for Good Friday. I’m grateful that there is more to life than just work and play and hard times and good times – that life means something after all, that God believed enough in our stories to sacrifice himself for us.
Today I am wearing my glittery cross necklace, not because I’m a foolish American consumer (although that may be) but because there is something poetic about the bauble. How outrageous that Jesus gave his all that I might casually wear a $12 necklace to remember him by. How humbling that I would take his sacrifice so lightly, how incredible that he would let me do so and not zap me on the spot, like the fearsome gods of mythology. It’s amazing to think that it’s such a small thing to wear a cross here in the U.S., where religious freedom still exists, but in countries around the world, Christians are martyred for much less.
Good Friday is indeed good, and I am writing this to myself: do not forget. Do not get comfortable and ignore the story God has given you. Do not forget the great sacrifice made for you, do not complacently consume and ignore and flit through life until your time is passed. Good Friday is good; life is good, and it is only because of Jesus.