Gratitude 162 Good Friday

22 Pilate said to them, “What then shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?”

They all said to him, “Let Him be crucified!”

Matthew 27: 22

I have always wondered why today is called Good Friday.

Perhaps because I was always a curious child I read all about the gory details of the crucifixion and fixated on them. That humans could be so despicable to one another hurt my soul.

I always blamed myself for Jesus’ suffering.

“Despite our earnest efforts, we couldn’t climb all the way up to God. So what did God do? In an amazing act of condescension, on Good Friday, God climbed down to us, became one with us. The story of divine condescension begins on Christmas and ends on Good Friday. We thought, if there is to be business between us and God, we must somehow get up to God. Then God came down, down to the level of the cross, all the way down to the depths of hell. He who knew not sin took on our sin so that we might be free of it. God still stoops, in your life and mine, condescends. “Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” he asked his disciples, before his way up Golgotha. Our answer is an obvious, “No!” His cup is not only the cup of crucifixion and death, it is the bloody, bloody cup that one must drink if one is going to get mixed up in us. Any God who would wander into the human condition, any God who has this thirst to pursue us, had better not be too put off by pain, for that’s the way we tend to treat our saviors. Any God who tries to love us had better be ready to die for it. As Chesterton writes, “Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate … Real love has always ended in bloodshed.”

― William H. Willimon, Thank God It’s Friday: Encountering the Seven Last Words from the Cross

I always blamed myself for Jesus’ suffering.

“I am wholly deserving of all the consequences that I will in fact never receive simply because God unashamedly stepped in front of me on the cross, unflinchingly spread His arms so as to completely shield me from the retribution that was mine to bear, and repeatedly took the blows. And I stand entirely unwounded, utterly lost in the fact that the while His body was pummeled and bloodied to death by that which was meant for me and me alone, I have not a scratch.”

― Craig D. Lounsbrough

I always blamed myself for Jesus’ suffering.

“How great is the love of God! He loved me long before I knew His name. He wooed me, chased me, enthralled me, and captured my heart. He didn’t prove His love at a candlelight dinner. There were no long-stemmed roses, but there were thorns. Yes, there were thorns.”

― Katherine J Walden

By fixating on the gory details of the crucifixion, I missed the point for many years:

I was not entirely alone to blame for Jesus’ suffering,

mankind’s salvation was the REASON for Jesus’ suffering.

XO Lisa