Friday, April 2, 2010

Good Friday: How The World's Biggest Hate Crime Leads To Hope



Drew Tatusko on Good Friday:
the triumphal entry turned into a blood-thirsty mob

Good Friday is evil. There is nothing "good" about it. After all what do Christians say in their confessions about the crucifixion? This is what Protestants all over will say on Esater Sunday about the crucifixion as a confession of faith:

(Jesus) suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;

He descended into hell.


There is a strange fascination with many Christians that looks at the cross as a gift. It is the punishment of sin that we don't have to endure because God decided to do it to his Son. For that we are to be thankful. Thankful? For a God who kills off his only son? We are to be thankful for a God who commits human sacrifice after stopping Abraham from killing Isaac?

....

Jesus came as a human being who sacrificed his human will fully in order to observe the will of God. When the two wills have been so intertwined this becomes the true son of God. His true divinity is his true humanity. One would think that this would be a good death on the cross. Of one who fought the good fight to reveal the Kingdom of God as a hero. But it's not. As Brandon Mouser says today:

He’s hanging on a cross and asks God, why he’s doing this to him. Why, in this hour when it would be tops to have the one person he should be able to count on to be there and offer comfort, why has God left him?

And God responds with a most deafening silence.

Crickets.


This is not a good death. It's an horrific death. The only people to blame are people; the same people who welcomed him as an ironic king demand his death and torture under Roman law. And it gets worse. Even with Jesus, the only one who had fully conformed to the will of God, hanging in torture on a cross as a result of his obedience, God still despises the sacrifice. It is the logical result of sin.

Good Friday is not good. Good Friday is the day when the holy becomes grotesque.

We now have to sit in somber mediation for the evils that we do that continue try to kill off God and place humankind above who God is.

Jesus is dead. God is dead.

If we cannot love Jesus dead, we cannot love him when he rises on Sunday.

To put this cart before the horse is perhaps the greatest blasphemy in the history of the Christian church.
Read the whole post: Here.

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