Ensign: What's So Good About Friday?

All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye. Isaiah 18:3

AN ENSIGN ON THE MOUNTAINS 14 April 2017

Where I grew up, the church I attended didn’t deal with all of Holy Week, just the culmination of it on Easter Sunday (sometimes called Resurrection Sunday because Easter and its symbols have some non-Christian associations). Indeed, until recent years I didn’t know very much about Holy Week itself. Tonight at the church I’m a member of we’ll have our Good Friday service commemorating Jesus’ death on the cross. As I recall, the Biblical account of crucifixion is read and the service ends in silence when the passage is finished. I still ask the question: What’s so good about it?

In this context, Good Friday is actually a corruption over time of the older “Godes Friday”, an early English name which means “God’s Friday”. (Compare this to “God be with ye” eventually becoming “goodbye”.) I don’t expect more than one or two in a hundred of us know that any more than we know that in last night’s Maundy Thursday service Maundy -- which I first heard some years ago as Moldy and wondered why we commemorated bacteria -- comes from the Latin word for “commandment” referring to the new commandment Jesus gave to His disciples to love one another at the Passover. (John 13:34)

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.

Now in our modern English sense of “good” as “possessing positive and life-affirming qualities”, the significance of the name is not obvious. Heck, we’re talking about the execution of a first-century Galilean, not exactly a newsworthy item in those days. But in the succeeding centuries it’s generated more buzz regarding what did or didn’t happen and what it did or didn’t mean than any other subject in the world.

What does Jesus’ death and resurrection mean to us? I’m not going to quote the Scriptures today; the story’s in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and we should know the gist of them. Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, His disciple Judas led the Pharisees and the Roman soldiers there for thirty pieces of silver (about twenty dollars), Jesus was arrested and beaten and convicted of sedition (what His preaching was called), but ultimately He was condemned to death by the mob (“His blood be on us and on our children!”), who chose to have a convicted murderer released rather than Him.

We can’t get to the resurrection on what we celebrate as Easter or Resurrection Sunday without the crucifixion. Life has no meaning without death. To rise from the dead, Jesus has to be dead first. But the next step, three days hence, will make all the difference in the world. Until we know in our hearts what difference Jesus makes to us, what’s so good about Friday will just be an academic question. Check out the disciples’ profiles; it would be easy to call the majority of them “street smart”, but the more you read the more it occurs to us there was no one personality type Jesus called to follow Him.

After two thousand years, human beings aren’t any different, and neither is Jesus’ call to each of us. Going into all the nations and preaching the gospel (the Great Commission, Matthew 28:19-20) doesn’t necessarily require us to leave our hometowns, but it requires us to be willing to reach out to those who are not like us because we are all created in the image of God. (Genesis 1:26) And Jesus, the Son of God, was willing to die for all of us because we are all in His image. That’s what’s so good about Friday, and every other day too. Amen.

Your Friend,

David

P. S. I write this weekly devotional to keep in touch with you, and I hope it encourages you too. If I'm not or you want me to get lost, please let me know -- thank you!

Thank You, Lord, that we can come to You in praise and prayer and that You provide for all our needs, even the ones we don't know we have! Let us pray for the peace of Jerusalem on both sides of the fence there and around the world.

Thank You, Lord, for all of us in leadership and service here and abroad, as well as for opportunities we have and the promise of new life! I pray we all seek and have a blessed week. Amen.