Fast 40: Practicing the Ancient Spiritual Discipline of Lentનમૂનો

BONUS DAY — GOOD FRIDAY

I think the saddest part about Good Friday just might be the fact that we don't understand its goodness. So much evangelical commentary I see on Good Friday has to do with a sort of transactional celebration, where we party because of Christ's Passion, where we are almost amused by His death. The Cross is no doubt spectacular, but to the Christian, it is not meant to be a mere spectacle, but an experience. Somehow, our hedonistic and narcissistic modern mindset has forgotten that to be a Christian means to be a Christ-follower—in the sense that we follow Christ to the Cross; and, lest the reader assume my meaning, to follow Christ to the Cross is not to simply stare at the crucifixion but to join it. But, you see, this point usually becomes less palatable (and thus less preachable) the more it is explained, which is why the Church has grown sick.

We have exchanged our nutritious, less-tasty theological food for something more palatable. We have rejected the theology of the Cross because it doesn't fit our modern emotional state of mind. It isn't positive but negative. It isn't happy but sad. It isn't successful but disastrous. It isn't edifying but destructive. It isn't a wedding but a funeral. It isn't practical but impossible. It isn't life but death. We modern Christians are like Christ's own fickle disciples, who follow Him through the good times and abandon Him in the bad. And as the disciples (and the devil) thought their discipleship was all over because Christ's life was over, our faith dies whenever we experience a Bad Friday. But that childish and superficial way of thinking gets in the way of understanding the paradox of the Passion.

The truth is that the Cross leaves us with a choice, which is a state of human affairs sometimes referred to as a crossroads. The story of Christ's Passion tells the unbeliever that if they reject the Cross, they reject the mercy of God, which brings justification. But there is an even deeper cautionary truth that is not meant for the heathen as much as for the Christian. It is this: if we reject our own call to crucifixion in the Christian life, we reject the mercy of God, which brings sanctification. That is because by refusing to join the sufferings of Christ, we are simply left with the sufferings of the world. By rejecting the one Cross we were meant to carry, we carry a thousand more we were never meant to endure. By turning away from the theology of Christian suffering, we only turn toward the biology of pagan pain.

There is no real answer to the deepest experience of human existence other than the answer of the Cross. The Cross is the key that unlocks the mystery of iniquity. It defeats defeat. It destroys destruction. It pulverizes pain. It depresses depression. It kills death. But it does this not by avoiding the topic of suffering but by addressing it in its most graphic details. The Cross is not mind over matter; it is mind through matter. It is not the Buddhist way of nothingness but the Christian way of goodness. The Cross takes the entire ineffable weight of gruesome human gore and turns it into unfathomable divine glory—not by turning suffering into stoicism but by turning suffering into sacrifice.