Good Friday

The cru­ci­fix­ion accom­plished many things. One of those things yet to be real­ized is “man’s inhu­man­ity to man.” Our his­tory is filled with such unnec­es­sary pain. The trail of blood goes all of the way back to Cain and Abel. Some­times the trail looks more like a river. The Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury was sup­posed to be the start of a per­fect mil­len­nium. It was any­thing but that. The Twenty-First Cen­tury started with dis­con­cert­ing omens: the Y2K scare, a deeply con­tested Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, and the pseudo-religiously moti­vated World Trade Cen­ter mur­ders.

Human­ity is not a pretty pic­ture. It seems that we are for­ever hang­ing peo­ple on crosses. The newest crosses bear the title of “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness.” It is socially accept­able to cru­cify some­one over a term. Motives do not mat­ter — only the utter­ances or lack of utter­ances of dic­tated terms (by the way, who deter­mines the terms?). Orwell’s prophecy is in full bloom.

It is Good Fri­day — the day we remem­ber humanity’s mur­der of God. This is not a safe planet. The closer one is to per­fec­tion, the more in jeop­ardy he or she may be. The oppress­ing forces are the same: arro­gant gov­ern­ments and pup­pet reli­gions. Pilate and Herod live on. Reli­gious wars con­tinue. The “Good” of Good Fri­day is spo­ken tongue-in-cheek. The only good has to do with how God is able to work through our stu­pidi­ties.

Still, this is one of my favorite days of the year. I open the church build­ing before dawn. I ring the bell at noon and three. There is music and the atmos­phere of con­tem­pla­tion in the sanc­tu­ary. It is a day of deep real­iza­tion and the annual reminder of humanity’s bru­tal­i­ties — from every angle. Life on earth is far from per­fect, but it is still worth the strug­gle.

Easter is com­ing. The mys­tery of the God that turns mur­der into hope still hov­ers over the cre­ation. It is a lit­tle like being in an open but empty build­ing all day long. There is hope mixed with antic­i­pa­tion, but it is cou­pled with the real­iza­tion of peo­ple try­ing to solve their ulti­mate dilem­mas through amuse­ment, igno­rance, hatred, word-juggling and name-calling, and in the pseudo-identities of age, race, cul­ture, or social class. Who do we think we are kidding?