Good Friday

Um, yes, it's a bit late. I know that. But I figure I can't let Easter/Good Friday get too far behind before I make a comment on it up here.

Good Friday. I always wondered when I was younger about why it was called good. What's so good about the saviour of the world, the son of God, getting flogged and beaten and mocked until he was half dead and then hung up on a cross to die of suffocation? Jesus was crucified on Good Friday. That's a historical fact. It's confirmed by sources outside the Bible, Pliny was one of them I seem to recall. But before he was crucified, he was beaten with a whip studded with bits of glass. The beating alone could kill you. The soldiers spat at him and mocked him, dressing him up and beating him around even more. Then he was forced to carry his own cross, up to a hill. People gathered round to watch, mocked him as he walked. He was nailed to it, and then hung up and left to die. It could take several days to die on a cross. It wasn't the bleeding or any of that which killed you, it was suffocation. In order to breath, you had to press against the nails in your feet, lift up your head, breathe in. Eventually the victim became too exhausted to lift their head, and they suffocated and died. If the guards wanted to speed up the process (which they did on this particular Friday, as they didn't want the bodies hanging their on the Sabbath which was doubly special because of the Passover), they broke the legs of the men they were crucifying. When they came to Jesus, he was already dead, so they stuck a spear in his side to make good and sure. Blood and water flowed out. Although that sort of knowledge probably wasn't hugely commonplace at the time, when you die, the blood and water starts to separate. So that showed he'd been dead for a while. Apparently some people think Jesus was still alive then. I highly doubt it, given all that. And if he had survived, he wouldn't have been in a fit state to push a stone away from his tomb and wander out into the village and say 'look everyone, I'm alive!'.

Anyway, given all that, I wondered for ages what was so good about Good Friday. I thought of it to myself as a bad Friday.

But the thing is this. Without the suffering then, we wouldn't have been freed from the curse of death. Jesus had to die like that. Not only did it fulfil the prophecies about him, that he would be hung from a tree, that he would suffer, that his stripes (the marks left by the whip) would heal us, but it also satisfied the needs of God's justice to have a punishment for all the wrong that has been done. You see, God loves us, but the sin separates us from him. He'd like to turn a blind eye, but God is just and you can't be just and turn a blind eye to people doing wrong. So 'God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us'(almost certain that's from Romans). Therefore, while Good Friday may not have been all that pleasant for Jesus, it was certainly good news for us. It meant that the perfect sacrifice had been found and offered up, and therefore we are free from the punishment that we deserved, 'for the wages of sin is death'(also from Romans, definitely this time).

It's like this. In the books of the law, a sacrifice had to be offered to atone for the people's sins. This was usually a lamb or a goat or a cow, something of that nature. The scapegoat used by the Isrealites is a particularly good example. What happened was, the High Priest would lay his hands on the head of this goat, and then all the sins of the Isrealite people would be laid on the goat, so that the goat could be taken away and the people of Isreal were free from their sins. The goat had taken the punishment for them. Now, a goat wasn't a great sacrifice--none of the animals were. So when the people sinned again, they had to sacrifice again.

Jesus put an end to the repeated sacrifices. He lived a perfect life, was a lamb without blemish (you couldn't offer an imperfect lamb that you didn't really want--in order for the sacrifice to mean anything, it had to be perfect), and therefore became the ultimate sacrifice for sin. When he was brutally killed by the Romans, he took on the sins of the world, and atoned for them, just like the scapegoat. But he did it permanently. His sacrifice lasts forever and ever, and it atoned for all sins that have ever been committed and will ever be committed.

I've heard it explained like this. As Jesus was being nailed from the cross, God, who is outside time, gathered up every sin that would ever be committed while the earth exists, and he hammered it to the cross along with Jesus.

That's why Good Friday is good. It was a good day for us, because now we can reap the benefits of that.