Inseparable

One of the more peculiar things about Good Friday is the tendency to act as if Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead. I know that we’re supposed to commemorate his crucifixion and death on Good Friday, but it doesn’t make much sense to ignore Easter Sunday. Apart from the Easter resurrection, Good Friday is nowise “good” and is really nothing more than a funeral for a man who was executed (tragically and wrongly) a long time ago.

There are some who would say that the resurrection doesn’t matter because we have Jesus’ teachings regardless of whether he is alive or dead. What such a statement fails to notice is that Jesus’ teachings contain two inseparable parts: the call to deny ourselves and die with him, and the promise that we will thereby find our true selves and live with him. If we do away with Jesus’ promise of Easter, then we’re left only with a despair-inducing call to die on not-so-Good Friday. (Note the opposite error: doing away with the call of Good Friday and trying to keep the promise of Easter.)

The point I’m trying to make is that Good Friday should not blind us to the fact that Jesus has been raised and that we too are to rise with him. Saint Paul puts it this way: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins…If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor. 15:17, 19) Even on Good Friday, there’s no point in pretending that Jesus is dead and we are enslaved to sin. Certainly we can recall that Jesus has died and that we once were enslaved to sin, but notice the change in the tense. Death and slavery are in the past, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise just because it’s Good Friday.

And so I would like to recommend that everyone read Romans 5:9-11 this Friday: “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”  The call and the promise - Good Friday and Easter - cannot be separated.