Today Is Good Friday
Today is Good Friday.
It is Good Friday because none of us are good. As much as we may fool ourselves, we’re just various versions of bad, wicked or worse. To believe otherwise is self-delusion, which is perhaps the one thing that each of us has too much of.
It is Good Friday because without it, regardless of what we do, death is our destiny–yours, mine and everyone else’s. Each of us is nailed to a cross borne of our own nature and of our own making. We have but to turn to the One hanging on the cross next to us and accept His sacrifice to be delivered from our fate.
It is Good Friday because our human frailties, flaws, faults and foibles–what God calls “sin”–were removed from His sight and will be remembered by Him no more, forevermore.
It is Good Friday because the same God/Man in Genesis that Adam heard walking and calling his name in the Garden, that Abraham lunched with in his tent, that Moses spoke to face-to-face in the desert tabernacle and that Isaiah spoke of–the One Who allowed Himself to be denied, mocked, humiliated, beaten, spiked, scourged, crushed, nailed to a cross, pierced to his heart with a spear, forgave His tormentors so that you and I may no longer fear the consequences of our fallen natures.
The last words from the cross were, “It is finished.”
What was “finished?”
The personal reconciliation of all of us with our Creator. By the lifting up His Son on the cross, we were lifted up out of the depths of our fallenness, out of the brokenness that has plagued humanity across the millennia and continues to do so to this day. He drank from the cup of wrath so we don’t have to.
“It is finished” means the completion of a precious gift freely given, waiting to be accepted in the deep quiet of one’s soul, felt in the grateful joy of one’s heart, expressed by the free confession of one’s lips–or keystrokes–and manifested in our treatment of each other that is marked by love, patience and forgiveness.
If that sounds simple, it’s because it is. No religion, no works, no sacraments. Just acceptance.
Ah, but who fails miserably in that test each and every day?
All of us.
Nonetheless, the offer of forgiveness and absolution remains open, and comes with an even better, second offering.
Today is Good Friday...
A very, very Good Friday.
