Every Friday I see it - Facebook friends, people I follow on Twitter - real friends, associates, colleagues, family - all saying 'Thank God it's Friday.' Most of us live our work weeks for the moment when we are freed from it. 5:00 PM on Friday is the highlight of most weeks for most of us.
Today is Good Friday - the Friday of all Friday's if you will. The highlight of not a week but a history. Outside it's raining and cold. Not very much like spring. I know how this day feels. I feel it - the cold, the rain, the dark. Like that Good Friday of centuries ago I am living a life of death this Friday. I lived for many years a life that was pretty privileged. I've not ever been rich or pampered. But I lived for most of my life surrounded by boundless opportunity. I had lifelong friends. I knew people. I had access to almost anything I wanted and if I didn't I knew someone who did. Life was good, even when I didn't see or recognize it.
Good Friday of 2011 I am living in what I now understand is the death of that life. The death of ease. The death of the hubris in which I was surrounded and that penetrated my soul. And I find myself serving a church in the same place - a place of death. A death this is equally painful. A death that is filled, as all deaths are, with sadness and loss. But a death that is the only answer to a depth of pain and wrong.
Problems that are deep have only one solution - a radical, painful procedure. For the follower of Jesus it is death. Jesus' death was painful, humiliating and long. It was not something that we want to spend too much time pondering. We want to look away. Our own deaths will be no different - how could they be?
One of my great heroes wrote these words in what most consider his greatest work:
"The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. … we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with His death—we give over our lives to death. … When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. …death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man [or nature] at his call. Jesus’ summons to the rich young man was calling him to die, because only the man who is dead to his own will can follow Christ. In fact, every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts. But we do not want to die…" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer - The Cost of Discipleship)
So on this Good Friday I am praying for death - for my own to be complete; for the death of my friends and family; for the death of churches that need to die. Only in this death can we find life. Hoping this is a Good Friday indeed.
