If this is Good Friday, why is it Good?

What, exactly, is Good about Good Friday? The easy answer will be that it portends the Sunday to come. But that is not to answer but dodge the question we are asking. For what we want to see is whether Good Friday itself has its own and not merely a borrowed goodness—a goodness it would retain were it taken in its full grimness and followed by no subsequent Heroics— a goodness which would be undiminished if the stone remained sensibly in place. The rather glaring problem with positing such an independent goodness for Good Friday: from the looks of things, Friday brought nothing but tragedy—nothing over and above a horrendous communal act of savagery resulting in an impossibly good man dead. What sense could there be in attaching the adjective ‘good’ (much less ‘Good’) to that, taken without reference to anything further? But to take this line is to beg the question. And we are inclined to beg it only because we have, in general, been taught to tangle the merits of Friday and Sunday. As a result, we see Friday, but fail to see from it; we only see Friday looking back from Sunday. And this makes us blind to any good to be seen from Friday only; and this, we will here argue, is to fail to see Good Friday at all. But we can do better. We can instead empty our minds of all related dreams, hopes, beliefs—of all we know or imagine we know—can halt all events and understandings at Good Friday’s dusk. Seeing from Friday, not beyond it, we will not read its dark disasters in borrowed light, but live it (as some marginal character undoubtedly did) in real time, as one who loved Jesus dearly, watched every moment of His excruciating and apparently pointless demise, and went home, crushed, to a cold dinner, expecting nothing further.

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It might be that, as such a person, we do not explicitly think through Jesus’ death and its implications. We would not, perhaps, consciously consider Friday to be the final word in a whole host of other ways: might not consider it settled that the rescue attempt—the attempt to ensure, not Death, but Love, has the final word in human affairs—failed; we might never explicitly suppose there is no future in loving, that every person and artifact composed will end by de-composing; that those we love will end as meat on a slab, bones in a yard, and that even their memory will be eradicated. Though we might not, we could (from Friday’s evidence) reasonably suppose there is no heavenly welcome to anticipate, no redemption of the body, no concerned Father, ready to intervene on behalf of his half-crushed children. From the ethical cry of the cross-watcher, “My God! No one is stopping this!” we might easily deduce the ontological “No One is watching this” or even “My God! There is no God!” Perhaps. But whether we suppose that we misunderstood some grand metaphysic, misinterpreted Jesus’ promises, or simply conclude that at some point the Son lost His Father’s support, what would break our hearts on Friday is a far simpler more personal fact: Jesus came to an end today. This man from my town, whom I broke bread with last Thursday, met His end via vicious betrayal, a bloody beating—a betrayal and beating which reduced a winking, laughing, welcoming local to something spluttering, raw, quivering, gurgling; healing hands stuck fast, pinned like a beetle to a board, absurdly croaking out final hopes and impotent benedictions.

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And now He is dead. And (therefore?) not God. Accept all this and now ask: does our love of Him, our allegiance to Him, change? And, more importantly, should it? Someone’s Friday reasoning might run thusly: “If Jesus is dead, He is not who I thought He was”. But this confuses the issue, by jumbling the matter of WHO Jesus was and WHAT (from Friday’s viewpoint) He may not be. But to which does loyalty and love properly attach? The Individual or the Office? As to the Individual: does your love of Him depart at his defeat because He is defeated? But what sort of love or loyalty is this? “I would have joined the Resistance”, says a similar-minded Frenchman, “but I believed it was going to lose”. Disgusting. What has winning and losing to do with the rightness of such resistance? As to the Office: “But if Christ is not raised, Christ is not God.” Fine. But what has this to do with loyalty or loving? Say, if you like, that you only love Jesus because He is God. Is that right? Meaning what? Does this mean that you will love, or at least honor, whatever/Whomever is God? Is being God really sufficient to gain your allegiance? Suppose in tomorrow’s mail you receive incontrovertible proof that up to now we have mis-figured; as a matter of fact, Moloch is God. Does your heart look over, from its position before the Cross, and, seeing this matter of fact, realize its mistake? Or would such a change of heart be to mistake how facts relate to your allegiance? Doesn’t such a change also leave out that it is because of your truer, deeper allegiance to Christ that the FACT that Moloch is God strikes you as the real mistake? Does the unbending god of blood and fire now really have your allegiance simply because he IS GOD? But what is that 'being God'? “He exists; He is powerful.” Fine. But whence the obligation? It does not follow from His existence or His Office. The idea that one could turn from the Man on the Cross to such a Deity is almost impossible to think. Rather, confronted with a devastated and dead Jesus and a live God of this sort, one would say something quite different—say, quietly but confidently, “No—if that IS God, then God will not be getting any adoration from me, come what may.” And the life of honor and love would then consist in perpetual rebellion against God—i.e. of living as Jesus did in spite of the Facts. In such a world, Job’s wife’s advice (“Curse God and die”) looms, not as the bad advice of the bitter, but as counsel reasonably sound. Yet if this rebellion would indeed be your position, you have revealed your fealty to Christ is not wholly contingent upon his Sunday victory. Moloch may be God; but He gets (and deserves) your defiance, while Christ, not being God, has your heart. ‘Being God’, then, is not intrinsic to your notion of proper allegiance; and your notion of proper allegiance floats free from ‘being God’. And this is because ‘Being God’ falls free from the proper relation to God—that is, fealty with love. And we should expect this. For we do not want to mistake loving a Who for loving a What; one can only ethically love a person, not a Power; and one cannot love a person for being a Power. Indeed, love is purest when it is rendered without giving Power a thought. Thus to brazen this out—to say, “If Christ is not raised, I will no longer love Him, identify with Him, honor Him, think of Him, follow Him”—to do this is less a mistake of fact than a misunderstanding of the role of fact with regard to power and love. And a slavish fealty to Whomever-May-Be-God-In-Fact is nothing less than making Fact God (and to make yourself a potential ‘idol to an unknown God’ in the bargain). If you make Jesus’ being God a condition for loving Him, your love is conditional, and you do not love Him for Who He is. You love Him only as Prince, and grow cold when you think Him a pauper. Conversely, to take the other position—that your love is not pinned to His Godhood— is a healthy step back towards the possibility of loving Him with a love which is personal—the only genuine kind. If this is right, there is a sense that the triumph of Jesus, invisible from Friday (except in the conviction we might have that “This can’t be!”), is irrelevant to our love of Him. There is no such relation between losing and loyalty which says, “Oh—He would have had my heart—but after His poor performance today...” Yes: for the forces of Good, Good Friday was an utter fiasco. Yet we may still see this ‘failure’ from Friday and say, “And yet—that there—I am for that” or “See Him there—I am for Him” or “I follow Him and His Way, regardless”... And we may, in a beautiful recklessness, say this while never supposing Friday to end—may say this while taking the entire world and life itself for a single, inescapable Good Friday.

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It seems we can, with respect to the varying value of different loves of Christ (love from Friday and from Sunday), go further. For commitment to the cause is measured precisely by how dark the conditions are for your side when you make it. The ultimate in commitment is one’s willingness to back causes which one believes lost. Thus we can say that Jesus, be He God or not, prefers your allegiance to be rendered before you know Sunday is coming. Friday’s darkness is thus a valuable resource; it is the moment in which to love is still to risk—a moment which evaporates once I look back from Sunday with its assurances and safeties. We were (it is hoped) earlier repulsed at the Vichy man we mentioned, whose involvement in the resistance was contingent upon some future triumph. On the same grounds we ought question a Christianity which rests on a love for Christ which can only warm to Him at the thought of His triumph, not of His death—as if His death was not itself a form of triumph which by itself should move us—as if a genuine love of Him should go cold without some cruder victory! Love of victory confused with the victories of love... But to love without seeing victory...“Blessed is He who does not see...”! This is not to make knowledge irrelevant. It is to claim that where love is concerned, Friday at nightfall offers not only sufficient, but superior light in which to commit—‘superior’ because, given what we have said, it appears as if a Sunday loyalty is too late to matter. Sunday, and the ethically excessive light its sunrise sheds, is not that upon which your allegiance, if it is to be maximal, must turn. God forbid! Rather, one’s allegiance must, as it were, precede knowledge of the Resurrection—must be entirely decided by Friday night. Your Sunday commitments mean nothing if the Christ of Friday was not already enough to evoke them. You must commit to your Captain while He is still on the cross. The re-union of you and He is unfavorably altered—diminished from a wild declaration of loyalty to a plea for rescue—if you await the arrival of Divine reinforcements before stepping into the open and hailing Him, “Here I am!” For here is loyalty, here is love: to step out into the dangerous night--the very night when He lies dead or dying-- and say, “Lord—Here am I!”—that is unsafe! That is worth doing! How glad He would be to hear it on that day in that hour! “Yes...you worship me Sundays. But he has been with Me since Friday." No hesitation! No regard for outcomes! When all seems lost, to be there...

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This, then, is the Goodness of Good Friday—a Goodness which we have tried to show is independent of the Goodness of Sunday’s Resurrection. “Perhaps” the Good Friday Christian can say, “my beloved Jesus is dead. Perhaps there will be no resurrection Sunday (perhaps there has been none.) Be that as it may, I know this: even if there is no resurrection Sunday, there should have been! And in my relation to ‘the least of these’ and as ‘the least of these’, I resolve to live as He lived and die as He died.” What has Sunday to add to this? At such moments we catch the inner heart celebrating Good Friday in full-- as Good without reference to future events. Celebrating Jesus as Jesus, whether God or not God, purely upon His matchless personal merit—purely upon His person—as Him to Whom we are irretrievably drawn. A simple: “I am with Him—either way!” with respect to which all other declarations and understandings are superfluous. One’s love, and so one’s self, is declared, in the absence of all other assurances. Where this love is genuine—that is, unconditional as His was unconditional— the ethical victory is complete Friday evening; we need not add the ontology of Sunday to secure it.

The crucified Christ calls to us, quite apart from the risen One.