What's Good About Good Friday?

One of the highlights of my life so far is a trip I made to Israel close on a decade ago. I was one of a group of journalists invited there by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. It was about a year after the so-called ‘al-Aksa intifada’ following the visit by Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount; Judaism’s holiest place but also regarded as Islam’s third holiest place.

 

Tourism slumped and so the hope was that half a dozen UK writers might tell the world that visiting Israel in the teeth of a full-blown war was still worth the fairly minimal risk. Interesting that we drove around at breakneck speed in bullet-proof vehicles and each of us had our own personal 24-hour guard who bristled with weaponry!

 

There’s an Olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane that is thought to have been there when Judas kissed the Master’s cheek over two millennia ago. The atmosphere in the Upper Room where Jesus and his friends ate the Last Supper glowed radiant as a shaft of golden sunlight flooded in through a single window high on a south facing wall. I met two fishermen, brothers Moshe and Yuval Lufan who showed us fish just caught in Keneret, Israel’s largest fresh water lake, the biblical Sea of Galilee. Moshe smiled a broad smile and said they were called Peter’s Fish. It was these brothers who discovered a boat buried in the lake but exposed due to a severe drought. It was thought to be 2,000 years old. Moshe told that when he found the boat a double rainbow appeared in the sky. It’s called the ‘Jesus Boat’ and is now preserved in a specially built Museum.

 

But without doubt the most poignant moment of the entire trip was when I stood at the mouth of a cave at dawn as the sun rose over the garden tomb, said to be where Jesus was buried. I found it easy to picture the scene; the Jewish Sabbath is now over and three women arrive to anoint the body of the crucified Christ on the first day of the week. As the women walk toward the tomb I could imagine them asking each other, ‘Who will roll away the stone?’ They expected an obstacle to bar their way to the man they had known and loved; an obstacle placed there by men to keep them at a distance. They passionately longed to see and touch the one who only days earlier had promised never to leave them, never to forsake them. But now he was dead; as dead as his words, and they struggled to understand how and why he could have disappointed them, but still they would preserve his memory by preserving his remains. But who would roll away the stone?

 

Richard Rohr says this; ‘The risen Christ is the lasting image and eternal icon of what God will do everywhere, for everybody, in all of time.’ In other words, God has a job description and this is it in the words of Paul the apostle: ‘He is the God who brings the dead back to life and who creates new things out of nothing.’

 

That tells us that the Easter story is all about hope; it’s what is good about Good Friday!

 

Richard Rohr again, ‘This risen Christ stands forever as a reminder of God’s promise, his guarantee and his lifetime warranty of what God has always been about and will always be about; turning crucifixions into resurrections!’

 

I firmly believe that this is the bedrock of what it means to believe in and be a follower of this Jesus; it is what puts the hope into the heart of Easter. Listen to Paul again, ‘For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all (not some) die, so in Christ all (not some) will be made alive.’

 

And do you know the best thing about it is that even while we are wondering, ‘Who will roll away the stone? Who will remove the obstacles that men have placed in our way?’ the stone has already been removed. There are no obstacles. Thanks to Easter, the way to him is clear.