Good Friday Year A 2023

We have a crowd bigger than usual. Good Friday seems to draw in the crowd. How to explains this larger-than-usual gathering? Is it because that time of the year has arrived for people to tick off their annual quota of “churchy” activities? Or is it because Jesus died on Good Friday and there is something about this Man nailed to the Cross?

Firstly, you might be at the wrong event, that is, if you were sinless. But if you accept that your state is wretched, that you are coloured by sin through and through, then you are at home here. This larger-than-usual gathering may just express your deep-seated and intuitive need for the Saviour who alone can restore you to God’s justice by taking your sins upon Himself.

Everyone, and not the generic we, needs to be saved. In other words, every soul hungers for the Saviour. In that way, some of us might be here even if we do not really know why, of all days, we are attracted to Good Friday. We are present because the Lord alone answers our longing to be redeemed. By submitting Himself to death for us, He has reconciled us with and justified us before God.

Did Jesus really have to die in order to achieve redemption? This question is important.

Firstly, the focus of Christ’s salvific mission is to heal our brokenness and to mend the relationship with God that was destroyed by sin. Man on his own can never accomplish the restoration. We cannot heal ourselves despite the present assumption that through self-help we can liberate ourselves. For example, think of how medically, man has been searching for the panacea of extending life or cell-life through ridding himself of free radicals. The general experience is that even those who succeed in staving off death will discover that their attempts can only go so far. We will die. Since we cannot save ourselves from death, then the only possibility for true eternity, that is, for the restoration of our friendship with God, is through our Saviour.

In the reparation of our relationship with God, was the death of Christ necessary and was it required that He died excruciatingly? Over the centuries, we have had different theories that tried to explain the gruesomeness of Jesus’ death. Did He need to be battered and bruised, beaten and brutalised in order to save us? Could He not have easily say the word so that we could be healed?

As you may realise, this age of convenience struggles with the notion of the Cross. We pop pills to get rid of pain. Suffering is to be avoided at all costs. An algophobic generation fears pain and this fear of suffering makes Good Friday’s bloody drama feel utterly senseless. The reaction to Mel Gibson’s supposed gratuitous gory in The Passion of the Christ is indicative of our aversion towards pain and suffering. Without a doubt, if pain is to be avoided, then the Cross cannot be anything but a barbaric and brutal symbol of death.

The insistence that suffering should be avoided exposes a hole in our belief. The bloody death of Jesus is incomprehensible for a culture where God is absent. We find suffering incompatible with God and we have come to view death as meaningless. Worse still, when there is no God, the suffering of Christ would be irrelevant.

But death and suffering are not punishments from God as they are the consequences of our sins. A contemporary illustration can help us understand. Think of the present rush toward the re-gendering of children. Children as young as 3 or 4 are being reassigned the gender opposite to their birth either surgically or medically. There are children on whom decisions had been made even before they have had the chance to outgrow their temporary dysphoria. In short, some will have to suffer later in life from decision made in haste. We are creatures of time or perhaps more accurately, we are trapped by time but the incessant need for instant gratification or solution can have devastating consequences. The future suffering of a transitioned individual is not God’s punishment as it is a consequence of our hasty and possibly sinful decision. That is just one example. Some calamities like floods in our country are not natural occurrences but the results of man’s own selfishness. In other words, much of the suffering we endure comes from the many sins of mankind.

From the perspective of self-inflicted suffering, the Cross is where the Saviour took upon Himself the punishment we have incurred due to our sins. The Cross is not God’s punishment. Instead it is Christ’s chosen instrument of salvation. Today Salvation hangs on the Cross bearing the blows of our sins and sorrows so that we might be restored to life eternal. On the Cross, the Saviour bids us to contemplate and be confounded by how our sins, my sins, so many of them, nailed Him to the Cross. If we are sinless, then the Cross would be meaningless. But take note that without the Cross, there would be no Christian. Far from it being the symbol of death, the Cross is the most powerful display of God’s immense love for man, for us, for you and for me.

Later as you walk up to venerate the Cross, gaze at Him bloodied and bruised, and know that it is impossible to love Him without the Cross. Under the standard of the Cross, a sinner is always at home because there, from the wounded side of the dying Saviour, flows the waters of forgiveness and the blood of everlasting life. Only the Cross can secure each sinner’s safe passage through the valley of death. The Cross is not the climb to Calvary but the ascent to the crown of the Resurrection.

Come, let us love Him. Let us worship Him. Let follow Him.