Photo cred: Kelly Sikkema
Written by: David Hood
Note: I wrote this a few years ago for our community newspaper and thought I’d share it again. If any of this resonates with or intrigues you, feel free to join us on Sunday at 4 PM at The Martin Luther Church, 933 Smyth Rd, for our Easter service. All are welcome!
Good Friday seems strange, doesn’t it? The message that will be shared in many churches today seems far from good. Ministers, priests, reverends, and pastors will talk about a first-century Galilean carpenter named Jesus, who claimed to be the Son of God, amassed an enormous following, and then was brutally executed in one of the most horrific ways imaginable, by crucifixion; the cruelest mode of capital punishment ever devised. The word translated excruciating was invented to describe it. None of the common terms of the time for pain and suffering were weighty enough to convey the experience of being stretched out, having nails hammered through your hands and feet, and being left for hours, sometimes days, to hang from a wooden beam, eventually drowning in your own blood.
How is this good news? What is good about it? What is good about Good Friday? Well technically nothing in and of itself. Lots of people were crucified before and after Jesus by the Roman Empire; criminals, traitors, rebels. But all of those people died, and that was it. They died. They stayed dead. But Christians believe that while Jesus died, that wasn’t the end of his story. Christians believe that three days after Jesus was crucified, he came back to life. He exited the tomb where he was buried and heavily guarded. He appeared physically to his closest followers, to his mother, to five hundred others, at various times and in various places, until forty days later he ascended back into the heavenly realm he had descended from.
This remains one of the most remarkable stories of all time. A man who was dead, came back to life, not a few minutes or even a few hours after he died, not by being resuscitated, no, a man who had been stone-cold dead and buried for three days, woke up and walked out of his tomb.
Now there are a lot of counter-theories out there: Jesus didn’t really die, a twin or doppelganger of his died in his place, his body was stolen and His followers simply lied, people in their extreme grief experienced group hallucinations, but none of these theories seems adequate to me, and they are largely explanations given by people who have a prior philosophical commitment to the idea that people don’t rise from the dead.
Here’s the thing, they’re not entirely wrong! People aren’t supposed to rise from the dead. Even the pre-scientific revolution and enlightenment Jews and Romans agree, and that was why the empty tomb and the claims and eyewitness testimonies of the early Christians were so extraordinary. And they weren’t shy about it, it was the focal point of all of their public preaching and teaching for decades. A bold move if they knew it wasn’t true. And indeed many of them were persecuted and some were martyred for their testimony, yet they were unwavering. You’d think at least one of them would have folded.
In the first few centuries, thousands came to be followers of Jesus. The Christian church was born in Jerusalem and spread throughout Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. The Roman Empire tried at various times to persecute Christianity into oblivion in notoriously grotesque ways, some of the most famous examples being Nero burning Christians alive on stakes to light his dinner parties, and the Coliseum where for entertainment hundreds came to watch Christians get fed to the lions; and yet Christianity grew and flourished. Today, over 2 billion people across the globe claim Jesus is Lord, and Christianity continues to grow, especially outside of North America and Europe, and even in places where it is illegal to openly assemble or practice or proselytize. There’s something very undeniable about the power of this story to move people across the globe even two thousand years later.
But why does the resurrection make the crucifixion good news? The narrative of the Bible claims that death came into our world, and with it all kinds of evil (war, genocide, sexism, racism, human trafficking, environmental degradation, greed, poverty, selfishness, relational breakdown etc…), because we disconnected ourselves from God, the source of life and love and goodness. Jesus, who claimed to be the Son of God, came to re-connect us to God and, therefore, to mend our broken world. He came to give us eternal life, that is a relationship with God that starts now and that carries on forever and ever into eternity. Jesus’ crucifixion was him absorbing our disconnectedness and all of its effects, and his resurrection was his overcoming all that disconnects us from God; his breaking through to the other side. Jesus’ resurrection is our certain hope that through him is re-connection to the God we were made for, forgiveness for the mess we’ve made, a fresh start, and new life; a resurrection. As we surrender to and let the risen Jesus live his life through us we can start to mend our own brokenness and the brokenness of our world, and someday Jesus will return from his heavenly realm and will mend our universe completely and finally. The Bible calls this the New Heavens and New Earth, and what is said about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia can be said about this new creation: “All (our) life in this world and all (our) adventures…(are) only…the cover and the title page.” Jesus’ renewing of everything will be “Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
This is how the resurrection makes the crucifixion good news. This is why I/Christians believe crucifixion Friday is Good Friday, because Easter Sunday is coming.