It is Good Friday. All of us have mixed feelings about it. We call it Good Friday because of what we know to be true. However, we also know that it was everything but good. I often wonder if this term was created because it is so difficult for believers to accept the violence and unconditional love expressed by the event. This was a violent baptism... yet believers are bent on "building up our false selves on the principle that we are right and good enough." To call it a bad Friday would create in us a sense of solidarity with all people (stealers, beggers, and murderers) and would force us to understand the magnitude of the love spilled out at Calvary. To refer to it as Good Friday makes us smile. This may seem a bit radical, and maybe Martin Smith would disagree, but Good Friday creates all kinds of mixed emotions for me. We celebrate it by a joyous term and then read the Scriptures with all kinds of dread and sadness. We say "It is finished!" and then we proceed with the next day's Easter Egg Hunts. I ate at IHOP with my family because we wanted to do something different for Good Friday. Yet in a few minutes I am going to walk into our chapel with a service that ends in the slamming of the Bible and the blowing out of a candle. Mixed feelings.
Jesus also experienced mixed emotions about the coming hours. He felt an overbearing dread of what was to come but also yearned in agony for the good it would ulitimately do. "...and what stress I am under until it is completed!"
Dread and yearning. In his death he would "show the magnitude of his identification with us in our alienation."
He was numbered with the transgressors. Just a number. Solidarity with everyone; not just the moral, ethical, or elite. "For each Good Friday to be good the Spirit must take us by the hand and reestablish our contract with that inmost core of recalcitrant evil, enmity, and impotence where we are sisters and brothers of the most depraved and lost. That is where Christ is, clasping them with his pierced hands."
I lied to someone today. A begger, outside of the restaraunt mentioned above, asked me for money. I said no. Actually I tried to clean it up a bit and told him that I didn't have anything but plastic. But I had plenty of one dollar bills in my wallet. So after I started up my van, I sat there and realized what I had done on this Good Friday. I saw my equal in God's eyes and immediately rejected a moment of solidarity with him. I did give him $2 as I exited the parking lot. He was a good man and thankful. And then I felt the pride as my children watched me do a good deed. But I question whether I truly meant anything by this at all. Was it guilt? Would I have done this on any other week other than Holy Week? I don't have the answer. But I do know this; that God will not be pleased until the meaning of the cross is evident in every action I take toward others. He will not quit until I live a solidarity with all human beings. For the Christ-event did not take place to make me into a moral person or a better person; the cross took place so that I could fully identify my true alienation from him. Jesus on the cross took place so that I could see my solidarity with beggers and notice how far removed from God if I am left to my own ways.
And Jesus asks us to take up our cross...daily. What does this mean in my relation to a begger hunched down below the windows of the restaraunt so that he won't be noticed? "I take up the cross and follow Jesus whenever I acknowledge my oneness with the guilty, whenever I stop pretending that they are an alien class. I put my cross down and hide among the moral crowd whenever I gloat over the sins of others; whenever I thank God that I am not as other men are."
"In prayer, I must practice being numbered among the many...the transgressors...and must start to care for this company where I belong."
She cut all the morbid stories out of the newspaper-the accounts of women who had been raped and criminals who had escaped and children who had been burned and of train wrecks and plane crashes and the divorces of movie stars. She took these to the woods and dug a hole and buried them and then she fell on the ground over them....She groaned "Jesus, Jesus"...her legs and arms spread out as if she were trying to wrap them round the earth.
- Flannery O'Connor, Greenleaf
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