It’s Good Friday. But we ask, what’s so good about it? The story we pause to remember today is about a thorny crown, a cross of torture, suffering, and death. Intellectually, the church and its theologians point us to the sacrifice of an innocent God for our sake and its benefits for us is what makes it good. Still, for me today, it doesn’t feel all that, well, good.
I’m distracted from the good by wondering what has changed over the 2000 years since Jesus was nailed up. The powerful seem just as corrupt and self-centered as ever and the hungry are still unfed. Actually, because the instruments of power and the mechanisms employed to maintain it have grown increasingly more deadly, I’m compelled to believe things are less good than ever.
And while it’s tempting to point my finger at “them,” I’m just as complicit. Haven’t I benefitted from the systems that prop up the powerful too? Isn’t my complacency just as much at fault? In contemplating this uncomfortably inconvenient truth, the cracks in whatever veneer I hope to maintain grow even more pronounced.
Perhaps the good about today, for us who are increasingly broken, doesn’t have to be about what has been done and can be about what will be. God hasn’t given up. What could be different if I don’t either? That’s the good I will pray for today.
May God’s peace come to you this day. -Pastor Peter
Let us pray…
In defiance of all that is wrong, broken, unforgiving, destroyed, shortsighted, wicked, corrupt, merciless, make this day… good. Amen.