This year we'll be worshiping on both Thursday and Friday leading up to Easter, and we're going to worship in new ways. Part of that means that I am building a cross for our Good Friday service. Something has struck me as I've worked in planning and building such an object. In some sense this is a spiritual discipline, connecting to the labor of love that God pours out on creation, both in the way of a "carpenter" and in the significance of God's action on the cross.
However, it is also very much an odd juxtaposition of emotions, much in the same way that Good Friday is.
As a "spiritual but not religious" friend of mine once asked:
"Happy Good Friday?"
Happy Good Friday about sums it up. As I make the first cuts in the wood beams, I am reminded that this is both a symbol of God's love for the universe and also an instrument of torture and death. Those are two realities that don't fit together. They never were really meant to. When I think about what happened on Friday, on Golgotha two thousand years ago, I realize that the cross isn't God making good out of a bad situation. It is the goodness of God destroying the futility of evil. Jesus' crucifixion was an attempt to do away with something holy, but what is revealed on Sunday is that in the worst of human actions, evil sows seeds against itself. At just the moment when the prosecution rests its case against humanity and all possible hope seems lost, the judge throws the book at the prosecution.
As I put the final nails in to secure the beams, I do so with the realization that I have just created a replica of something on which real people have bled and died. I do so with the realization that what I have now built is the same thing that many have built out of reverence and many for evil. I do so knowing the very real human cost that such a thing represents, and millions of people who were and are "crucified" in some form or another in our world. Ultimately I do so with the knowledge that this cross represents the power of God over the evil in our world. Over hatred and violence, oppression and demonization. Over the power of sin and death."The power of God over the power of sin and death."
On Friday we will gather at the foot of this cross and lay our burdens down before it. Because, in Jesus, God has taken all of the worst things we could possibly come up with and subverted them, undermined our worst intentions to make something good and whole and beautiful.
On Friday we will morn and we will repent.
But what makes Friday "Good" is that the story does not end on the cross, or in the tomb. What makes Friday "Good" is that Sunday comes, a new day dawns for all of creation and we hear the first words of the day: "Do not be afraid."
