Good Friday

Today is Good Friday. The world has its way today. Today we remember the peak of human achievement, the apex of all our striving to assist God, the culmination of our ability to judge good and evil. On this day we lifted up the Son of Man.

From the 11^th chapter of John’s gospel (TNIV):

Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple [the Greek is “place”] and our nation.”

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

To understand what’s going on in this story you need to remember this: In a dark and dire time, God made a covenant with Abraham (Abram) in which God promised (1) to give Abraham and his descendants the land (a place), (2) to make Abraham’s descendants a nation (a people), and (3) to be their God and to be with them (a presence). And God’s covenant had a purpose: God’s people, in God’s place, with God’s presence, were to be the people through whom God would bless all the families of the earth. In sum, the covenant was a promise by God to make a people in a place and to be present with them for a purpose.*

In response to God’s covenant promise, Abraham was expected to believe God, to trust God’s promise, and to go and do as God commanded. When you put all these verbs together—believe, trust, obey—you have faith.

God promised; Abraham believed, trusted, obeyed—“and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

At least most of the time. But every once in awhile Abraham and/or Sarah decided God needed assistance to keep the covenant promise alive. Twice Abraham passed Sarah off as his sister because God sent them into dangerous territory and Abraham did not trust God to protect him. And when the promised son was tardy, Sarah and Abraham decided to help God keep his promise.

After Abraham had been 10 years in Canaan, and the promised son had not been born to him, Sarah, now 76 years old, despaired of sharing in the promise, and proposed earthly means to secure a son to Abraham and obtain the name of mother. In accordance with a custom of the times, she gave her maid to Abraham.**

This pattern that Abraham and Sarah set, the pattern of God’s people using earthly means to  “assist” God to fulfill his promise, is continued throughout the bible and includes such earthly means as theft, political intrigue, cowardice, deception, alliances, idolatry, greed, envy, murder, war, and more. We pretty much break all the commandments of God in order to help God. And that brings us back to the Gospel of John and the events leading up to Good Friday.

What did the chief priests and Pharisees fear? As children of Abraham, they feared that the covenant would be broken. They feared that if Jesus were allowed to continue working his signs the Romans would come and take away their place (their land) and their nation (their status as a people) and the temple (the place of God’s presence). In other words, they feared that God’s covenant promise that they would be a people in a place with God’s presence could not survive this man, Jesus. God seemed unwilling to stop Jesus, so in their wisdom, their judgment, their calculated understanding of good and evil, they decided to take matters into their own hands. They decided that Jesus must die so the covenant promise could live.

The contrast between Jesus and the religious leaders could not be more stark. Jesus, in the face of certain death, obeyed and trusted God to manage the outcome, regardless of the costs. The religious leaders, because they did not trust God and because they decided the cost was too high, decided that it would be better for one man to die than the whole nation to perish. They tried to manage the outcome (to assist God) even if it meant disobeying God’s direct command not to murder.

And so, the irony of Good Friday. Once again the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil persuades us that the end justifies the means. Once again, with the best intentions, evil is enlisted in the service of good. Once again we judge that killing one person will preserve God’s honor. Once again we presume to assist our heavenly Father, even as we kill his only begotten son. Once again we employ earthly means to help God keep the covenant promise. Once again....

Who is Jesus? He's the one who trusts God to fulfill the covenant promise. He's the one who obeys regardless of the cost, the one who knows the cost of his faith.

Where is Jesus? Because he trusts God he is on the way to the cross, and on the cross, and in the grave.

What then shall we do? We shall trust God in the same way. We shall obey God's ways and resist the temptations of earthly means. We shall believe, trust, and obey. We shall have faith.

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*Thanks to my friend A.J. Culp for sharing this helpful interpretive insight on covenant.

**from The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible (1944 edition), p.221.