Reflections on Good Friday

I haven't always been good at reflection during the Christian holidays. Perhaps it is the desensitization that often happens when you are overloaded with Sunday school stories as a child. Maybe it is our culture's movement away from the original meanings of the Christian calender toward an emphasis on the consumer calender. Still it could be the habit of many of our Christian traditions to strip Christ from His 1st century context and reduce the meaning of this weekend to the crucifixion of Christ and a free ticket to heaven. Most likely it is a combination of these (and possibly a few more) factors that allow my thoughts to drift. Fortunately today was different and I found myself reflecting on this day of approximately two thousand years ago. Not just on what it means to me today, but what it meant to those early followers of Christ. When Easter hadn't happened yet... When this man who claimed to be the Messiah now faced and experienced death. What about the Abrahamic promise? We were to be a blessing to the nations.... Through the times of exile and captivity... Was this really the Christ? The Lord that was greater than any ruler in Rome or any other region... He was dead? He was supposed to bring forth the Kingdom...
Although I don't have first hand experience of that day, the hours, and the minutes that these early believers lived, in my reflections I found that in many ways we continue to ask the same questions that they must have. While we know that Good Friday isn't the end of their story, we today await the conclusion of our own story. It seems that Easter isn't just a story we believe from the past but a story we are a part of. When we say goodbye to loved ones in their death we hope... when we await our own death we hope... when we see so many injustices in the world we hope... when we see Creation being disrupted by the sins of man we hope.. It is in that Hope that we live this life. Sometimes we doubt a bit and wonder if it is all true. We wonder in our contemporary world, with its naturalistic assumptions, if we really can believe in a ressurrection? Yet sometimes when the beauty of this life becomes most evident, those moments of awakening and connection with the Holy One, we know that there is something worth believing in it all. I am sure many of those early Christians experienced doubt during the time between Friday and Easter morning. Yet all hope had not been lost. True faith will acknowledge the reality of that tension between hope and doubt. Giving us strength to continue on in the midst of the strongest challenges to our faith. My point in sharing all this is not to promote a form of skepticism in which we live in doubt. Rather, my point is that we can find something in common with the early Christians in our lives on this Good Friday. As they awaited a ressurrection that would birth the Christian faith, we together are awaiting a ressurrection in which we will all come to know fully the Hope that allows us to press on in this life. In that hope we can respond with Christians throughout the centuries.."He is risen!...He is risen indeed!" Ken