Providing Christian resources from the YMCA past and present to nourish inclusive, equitable work in our diverse and global neighborhoods that build up healthy spirit, mind and body for all.
For twenty centuries, women and men from around the Earth somehow keep trusting in God and the resurrected Jesus Christ, a reality and mystery which still shapes how we live and love, how we hope and serve, how we care and lead in this beautiful and heart-breaking world.
That’s the empty tomb.
In Jerusalem.
Inspiring to see, to be reminded that Jesus of Nazareth was dead but is resurrected.
Why?
There’s not a simple answer.
Since it is so profound, it requires faith to grasp, and then barely.
The “why” gets at an existential and fundamental reality about the world and our participation in it with God.
Here’s how old St Paul put it to the carousing Christians in Corinth:
“But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.
For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn:
Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.
Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power.”
/ 1Corinthians 15:20-24 NIV
Not that this explains everything, but it unveils a take on reality that is both jarring but inspiring.
I love how he ends this chapter of the letter:
“Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm.
Let nothing move you.
Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”
1 Corinthians 15:58 NIV
Clearly trusting in God and the resurrected Jesus Christ shapes how we live and love, how we hope and serve, how we care and lead in this beautiful and heart-breaking world.
For me I’m still working out what the “why” means for me – still praying and learning, still trusting, still seeking and striving, still hoping.
Why call it Good Friday when it is a day of grief, of sorrow, of suffering, a day of affliction and transgressions, a day of iniquities and wounds?
Ultimately: Today is God’s Friday. And on His Friday, God turned a Bad Day into a Good day.
But why?
Why is today called Good Friday?
Many years ago my then six year old son said, “Shouldn’t it be called Sad Friday?”
His twin brother suggested that it be called Bad Friday, since Jesus was killed on a cross.
Indeed it was a bad day for God.
His One and Only Son was unjustly condemned, slandered, betrayed, abandoned, tortured, mocked and murdered.
It was a sad day for God; it was a sad Friday for Jesus.
Why call it Good Friday when it is a day of grief, of sorrow, of suffering, a day of affliction and transgressions, a day of iniquities and wounds?
Why call it Good Friday when God’s Son is humbled and crucified for preaching the Good News of God’s Kingdom?
If anything, it should be called God’s Friday.
On it God’s Son was killed by God’s people; they had killed another of God’s Prophets as they had done in centuries past, another of God’s Servants rejected.
On this Day it was God’s Kingdom that was resisted, God’s good News of Deliverance and Salvation of Peace and Righteousness rejected.
God the Father sent His Son to be the New King of Israel; to fulfill that ancient promise to Abraham: “I will bless you, I will make you a blessing, through you I will bless the world.”
Instead, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Israel killed their promised king.
It was a bad Friday for God the Father! Why call it Good Friday when it’s a day marked by violence, rebellion, and defiance? If nothing else, call it God’s Friday, just not Good Friday.
The earliest Christians called today Holy Friday.
Holy carries with it the meaning of set apart, unlike all else; for obvious reasons, today is holy, unlike all other Fridays in all of history.
Today also became known as Great Friday.
Third Station of the Cross, Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem
A tradition developed in early Christianity when every Friday became a Holy Feast Day in remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion.
This day today became known as Great Friday, a distinction from all the other Holy Feast Days.
Holy Friday. Great Friday. Those are some apt and ancient names for today.
Maybe we should reclaim those early titles for today – instead of calling it Good Friday, call it Holy Friday, or Great Friday. But Good Friday?
Here’s how St. Paul describes the significance of that great and holy day:
Who, being in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he made himself nothing, By taking the form of a servant Being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, He humbled himself By becoming obedient to death Even death on a cross.
Letter to the Church of Philippi
You could say that God’s heart was hammered onto a hardwood tree that day; a day of humiliation and rejection, a morning of deathly brokenness, of shattered bleeding love.
Ninth Station of the Cross, Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem
God suffered on this Friday. God in the flesh was staked to a rough-hewn pole amidst criminals.
On this Friday God the Son who came to serve and save was ripped to shreds. His life and blood pouring out onto the stones on this Friday.
God gave a vision of this many centuries earlier to a prophet who was also rejected and tortured and destroyed in a tree (according to legend). [It is told that on his final day, Isaiah was stuffed into a hollow tree and then sawn in half.]
Isaiah was a servant that suffered. He was the servant of a God who suffered. He was given words to remember about another servant to come who would suffer:
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering. Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers are silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away, yet who of his generation protested? He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death. Though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit found in his mouth.
This makes for a Sad Friday. As my son Levi said, “It should be called Bad Friday.” Or at least, instead of Good Friday, God’s Friday.
In German, the day is known as Gottes Freitag. For a nation that predates ours, they carry the tradition of calling today God’s Friday.
But it also seems that some in Germany long ago referred to today as Gute Freitag.
Gute carries with it the meaning of Benevolence, Charity, Kindness, Goodness.
And so it seems the tradition of suggests calling today Goodness Friday or Sacrificial Kindness Friday.
Ultimately: Today is God’s Friday. And on His Friday, God turned a Bad Day into a Good day.
As we read the sorrowful story in the Gospel According to Luke, amidst the words of grief and paragraphs of pain, there is a simple, stunning line from God’s Son that transforms God’s Friday into a Good Friday:
Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with them to be executed. When they came to the place of The Skull, they were crucified him there, along with the criminals – one on his right, the other on his left. And Jesus whispered amidst his tears groans: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
He’s not supposed to be there, between two brigands.
Jesus was a good man. He brought good news. He was good news. He healed the sick, fed the hungry, befriended the poor, lifted up the lame, set sinners free, generously gave away faith, hope, and love.
It can’t be a good day when God’s good Son is unjustly put to death. But even amidst the torture and agony and pain, God’s Good Son lets his body:
Be pierced for our transgressions, Be crushed for our iniquities. He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.
Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
This is the Father’s Friday. For those that believe, trust, accept, want it, today can be a God’s Goodness Friday.
How would someone know that you believed that today is a Good Friday?
How would someone know that you trusted in the Father’s Forgiveness?
How would someone know that you believed that on Good Friday the Father laid on his Son the iniquity of us all?
How would someone know you want today to be a Good Friday?
They would know it when they hear you whisper those same words of Jesus on the cross amidst your own sorrow and suffering. “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.”
When you are afflicted and crushed, we’ll know you believe God’s Friday is a Good Friday when you whisper the words of God’s Son.
Why is today called Good Friday?
Because one by one, Christians quietly choose to respond with God’s good forgiveness when we are sinned against – like what our Father in Heaven did for us on that day long ago.
It’s always been God’s Friday.
Through our response to the Father’s forgiveness, our lives, our words, our forgiving just as God forgave us – this will become the best answer to the annual question: Why is today called Good Friday?
“The Christian can never regard himself as being on the winning side, nor can he look on with pleasure while everyone else goes to perdition; should he do so, he would be lacking in the Spirit of Christ, and by that very fact he would cease to be a Christian”
Looking back now, reflecting on the infamy of January 6, 2021, like many American citizens I find the times to be disturbing – and asking myself: what are better ways for Christians to participate in politics (as it really is in America) and engage in public service (health, education, justice, arts, etc.) in a way that is faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ but not duped by political/economic ideologies which are marked by insidious violence and justifying the means (usually in a downward, mimetic, rivalrous, spiral)?
Is there a role for virtue and character?
Common bonds of solidarity and neighborliness?
Sacrificial love and healing truth?
Taking the high road and defusing antagonisms?
What does it look like to humbly imitate Christ in this politically toxic era?
And how does the “C” in the YMCA grow healthier and stronger amidst these contentious and all too often embarrassing public actions by Christians in the public square?
Rather than go mute or get louder, who can be a helpful guide for Christians in the YMCA who want to authentically live out their faith publicly as caring servant-leaders for all?
This book by Jacques Ellul – The Presence of the Kingdom – is a modern classic; it was forged in the fires of oppression in World War 2 by one who participated in the French Resistance, an atheist who converted to Christ, a brilliant lawyer and small-town pastor and activist, there is much that Ellul can teach YMCA leaders on ways to put their faith into practice amidst turbulent times.
The following comments and quotes are adapted from a post I originally published on a personal blog in February 2013; I find that it still rings true almost a decade later…
“In focusing more and more on what Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God, there is some new imagination required for what that would look like in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Especially when being a pastor in a community results in potential political activity.
I am disillusioned with our political reality in the USA, disappointed in how popular Christianity has aligned itself with politics in order to protect their assets, their power, their position, and their rights.
There is within me an instinctive repulsion to pastors and politics; there has to be a better alternative to posturing and press statements?
How to think about being a pastor and involved in politics without ending up as a pawn or a populist?
In these days of searching and listening, I turn again to Jacques Ellul.
I found the following paragraphs from The Presence of the Kingdom to be immensely challenging and provoking to me as I seek confirmation of God’s leading in my life’s work.
My interests and skills and calling have lead me into social and political issues; in my vocation as a pastor, as a Christian leader, there is some inner questioning whether this direction is appropriate.
In seeking some kind of justification or spiritual foundation for what I sense to be right, knowing there is no utopia, Ellul is most helpful – what I quote below from him has been formative for me, challenging, and hopeful:
Jacques Ellul (b. January 6, 1912 / d. May 19, 1994)
“The Christian can never regard himself as being on the winning side, nor can he look on with pleasure while everyone else goes to perdition; should he do so, he would be lacking in the Spirit of Christ, and by that very fact he would cease to be a Christian.
Bound up with the lives of other men (be economic and sociological laws, and also by the will of God), he cannot accept the view that they will always remain in their anguish and their disorder, victims of tyranny and overwork, buoyed up only by a hope which seems unfounded.
Thus he must plunge into social and political problems in order to have an influence on the world, not in the hope of making a paradise, but simply in order to make it tolerable – not in order to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply in order to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order of preservation that God wills for it – not in order to ‘bring in’ the Kingdom of God, but in order that the gospel may be proclaimed, that all men may really hear the good news of salvation, through the death and resurrection of Christ.
Thus there are three directions in which the Christian ought to action the world:
First – starting from the point at which God has revealed to him the truth about the human person, he must try to discover the social and political conditions in which this person can live and develop in accordance with God’s order.
Second – this person will develop within a certain framework which God has ordained for him.
This is the order of preservation, without which man lacks his true setting.
Man is not absolutely free in this sphere, any more than he is free in the physical or biological domain.
There are certain limits which he cannot overstep without danger to the society to which he belongs.
Thus the Christian must work, in order that the will of God may be incarnated in actual institutions and organisms.
Third – this order of preservation will have meaning only if it is directed towards the proclamation of salvation.
Therefore, social and political institutions need to be ‘open’: that is, they must not claim to be all, or absolutes.
Thus they must be constituted in such a way that they do not prevent man from hearing the Word of God.
The Christian must be ceaselessly on the watch – intelligent and alert – to see that this ‘order’ is preserved.
But, in doing so, he will find that he is confronted by two possible errors.
The one error consists in believing that by constant progress in this order we shall attain the Kingdom of God.
It is enough to remind ourselves of the Book of Revelation, or of Matthew 24, to condemn this attitude.
The other error arises out of the conviction that by achieving certain reforms we shall have reached this order which God wills.
In reality all solutions – all economic, political, and other achievements – are temporary.
At no moment can the Christian believe either in their perfection or in their permanence.
They are always vitiated by the sin which infects them, by the setting in which they take place.
Thus the Christian is constantly obliged to reiterate the claims of God, to reestablish this God-willed order, in presence of an order that constantly tends towards disorder.
In consequence of the claims which God is always making on the world the Christian finds himself, by that very fact, involved in a state of permanent revolution.
Even when the institutions, the laws, the reforms which he has advocated have been achieved, even if society is reorganized according to his suggestions, he still has to be in opposition, he still must require more, for the claim of God is as infinite as His forgiveness.
Thus the Christian is called to question unceasingly all that man calls progress, discovery, facts, established results, reality, etc.
He can never be satisfied with all this human labor, transcended, or replaced by something else.
In his judgment he is guided by the Holy Spirit – he is making an essentially revolutionary act.
If the Christian is not being revolutionary, then in some way or another he has been unfaithful to his calling in the world.”
Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, pgs 35-37
Which quote sticks with you as illuminating or provocative or hopeful?
What insight does it provide to you on how Christian’s can engage publicly – as people of faith – while leading and serving amidst the tumult?
