What's So Good About 'Good Friday'? - 31/03/10
By Amy Galea
There is nothing good about death. If you have lost someone you love, or been close to death yourself, you know this as truth. There’s nothing lovely about an empty corpse lying in a casket. There’s nothing pleasant about the day you bury a friend. And there’s nothing sweet about watching someone you love so much, get sick and die.
A week ago today my friend discovered that he has cancer and has around two years left to live. This kind of news is numbing. It makes you consider what is worth spending time and thought on. This is real and this is scary.
Death is scary. And it could appear slightly ironic that at Easter each year, we are given a public holiday to celebrate or remember ‘Good Friday.’ A day that refers to the crucifixion of a man who committed no crime, a man who was brutally killed in a manner reserved for the worst of criminals. This man who was mocked, whipped and nailed up on a cross and left there to die. Jesus Christ, God’s Son, who wasn’t just fully man − but also fully God.
We’ve got to wonder what that’s all about. In the Bible it says “Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring you to God”. It says that Jesus Christ’s death was enough to cover the sins of the world, as “he who committed no sin, became sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”.
Jesus Christ lived the perfect life we should have lived, he died the death we should have died and he’s coming back again to judge the living and the dead. Jesus is offering himself in your place − he’s offering to take away every wrong thing you’ve ever done and will ever do, so that you can be in a right relationship with God.
The brutality of his death on that cross demonstrates to us how God sees our sin − that it is our sin that separates us from him. It demonstrates to us that our sin is a very big deal and requires the greatest sacrifice to be taken on our behalf. We need to turn away from living life our own way and follow God, the Creator and Sustainer of all things.
In Jesus we can trust that our sins that are as red as scarlet, will be made as white as snow. That in Jesus we are made new, ‘born again’, and that God is our Father and heaven is our home. Followers of Jesus love him because he loved us first. Followers of Christ are not super-humans, nor do they (or should they) claim to be. Christians are merely people who have acknowledged the fact that they are great sinners and that they are in need of a great Saviour − Jesus Christ. No good deeds can make humanity good enough for God – rather it is in the single act of Jesus’ death and resurrection that we can be saved.
When you contemplate the magnificence and significance of what God is offering us through Jesus it makes sense that the day marked by Jesus’ death should be referred to as ‘good.’
When Jesus rose from the dead three days later, he showed that he had complete power over death. Jesus offers us life. I cannot relay the comfort I feel, when I read these words in Hosea 13:14, “Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?”, Jesus takes the sting out of death by offering us eternal life; this is a certain hope that his followers hold.
Time is short. Before you know it you’re in third year arts and wondering what the heck you’re going to do when you graduate. Time is short and sometimes we can be distracted by the little things or other man-made things. Things like the particular tradition of a church, or whether or not we find Christians un-cool or incredibly sheltered, or if we think religion is dated and truth is relative.
But here we are, yet again, at Easter. Why don’t you let Jesus speak for himself? Open up a gospel, talk to a Christian friend, find out about who he claims to be and what he claims to offer. We know in our being that life is short, that death sucks and that there is so much that is wrong with this world we live in. We get two public holidays out of it, perhaps it’s time to lend Jesus our ears.
Amy Galea is in her third year of an Arts/Creative Writing degree. Her ideal morning would involve muesli at North Beach Kiosk after a swim. And if Marcus Mumford could make it she wouldn’t be complaining.
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