What good is today?
Photograph by Diana Vargas via Unsplash
Rev. Dr. Robert W. Lee
Can anything good come from the terror and horror of the worst means of capital punishment that the Roman Empire employed in the first century? Can anything good come from the desolation of a mother having to watch her son die the most gruesome death? Can anything good come from a band of followers dispersing into the night and vehemently denying their participation in the best thing this world would ever see to save their own skins? Can anything good come from Good Friday?
To be fair to all of us thinking that, in fact, something good might come of this week and this particular day, we sit on the side of the resurrection that feels insulated from the disorienting grief that the disciples and those who loved Jesus must have felt. We know how the story continued and how it leads to us this Holy Week. Yet for years I’ve always wondered why we call Good Friday “good.”
In the Christian tradition there are various means of understanding atonement, or how God desires to be “at one” with us through salvation and sanctification. While some might understand the cross as the ultimate means of God’s love and identification with humanity, others see the resurrection or the incarnation as the sign that God could do nothing except get down in the muck and the gutter with us. The challenge for us is to recognize Jesus in the gutter. As Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
We are in a great company who bear witness to the fact that we threw the worst we could at God on this day years ago, and God was able to remind us of what love looks like.
This Good Friday might I encourage you, wherever you are, to look at the stars. Look to the luminaries, both celestial and earthbound, who have shown you thus far along the way. For many of us that has been those saints who have gone before us and stand beside us. We are in a great company who bear witness to the fact that we threw the worst we could at God on this day years ago, and God was able to remind us of what love looks like.
In John Green’s phenomenal work of nonfiction, The Anthropocene Reviewed, he rates the pleasantries and challenges of the modern era. One line stood out to me in the book. Green writes, “We all know how loving ends” — which is to say that love ends with loss in one form or another. We all know how this story should end for Jesus. The tomb awaits him, hopes are dashed, the pain is real, the story is over. Yet deep down, we all know it couldn’t end there. It was never meant to end there. We are proof that it doesn’t end there. Today I’m thankful that my goodness, that the goodness of this world is not predicated on what happened today. The story is much bigger and bolder than any of that. Just you wait, the world is about to change forever.
The Rev. Dr. Robert W. Lee is an American Baptist minister and author of six books. He has preached across the world, written for all kinds of media outlets, and appeared on television on CNN, MTV, and ABC’s The View. Visit his website at www.roblee4.com to connect with him.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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