We call it “Good Friday” now. But no Christian should want to relive that day.
On the day we call Good Friday, Jesus’ disciples were foolish. They volunteered to die with him, demonstrating that they neither understood his mission or their own hearts. Hours after pledging their lives, they fled at the sight of Roman soldiers. The best friends Jesus had, the men who had spent three years by his side, stood back, denying they even knew him, as he was given over to an illegal trial for his life.
Witness after witness told lie after lie, so many lies that the Scriptures tell us that the testimonies didn’t even agree. Jesus was beaten, mocked, and pronounced guilty on the authority of actors, and nobody intervened. Nothing happened to stop the farce and return Jesus his dignity. No one stood up to corruption and injustice. He was alone.
He was alone as Pilate cowered before the crowd and ordered him flogged until his flesh hung off his bones like wet parchment. He was alone as Pilate cowered again and ordered his crucifixion, declining to announce what crime was being punished. He was alone as the weight of a wooden cross smote him into the earth. He was alone as the nails were driven with ruthless efficiency. A man who had raised little girls up from the dead was stripped naked so that federal agents could play dice with his clothing. Nothing happened, no one stopped it.
Why do we call this day “good”? This is the kind of day that we learn about in history textbooks, with black and white photos of burned bodies stacked on top of each other. This is the kind of day where we watch Planned Parenthood surgeons sift through a petri dish of humanity, looking for the most valuable of the remains. This is the kind of day where armed guards open fire on peaceful protesters, or sic dogs on children. There’s nothing remotely sentimental about the cruel injustices of “Good Friday.” So why do we call it good?
We call it good because tradition and nostalgia aren’t synonyms. The past—the realities of the faith once for all delivered to the saints—is our life. Without Calvary there is no church, there is no heaven, and there is no hope. Christians don’t believe in the idea of the atonement—they believe in the history of it. Jesus really did die on a cross, in a real part of the Middle East, surrounded by real people who really did shout for a healer and a teacher to be murdered by a government they proclaimed to hate. This isn’t just theology. It’s history. It’s our history, our tradition, and our hope.
It’s not, however, our nostalgia. Tradition is about receiving from the past; nostalgia is about disfiguring it. Nostalgia is our cultural mood right now because it affords the comfort of the past while letting us Nostalgia is superficial in essence but can be tyrannically earnest; we can try to reinvent our entire lives in the image of that which reminds us that we were once young. But for the age of nostalgia, hope is to be found in the here and now. We must be nostalgic so that we can be comforted by the past without being taught by it.
We dare not be nostalgic about Easter. Only the foolish would sentimentalize the flogging, the walk to Golgotha, and the naked, shredded flesh. To make the Passion an object of our nostalgia—to see in it only the value of our grandfather’s generation, the benefit of a “Christian nation”—is to spit upon the cross itself. It is said that in the United States are millions of “Easter and Christmas” churchgoers, those who make time in their secular existence for two hours of hymnody a year. Oh, if only these Americans could see in their holidays the blood and the gore and the evil! If only they could see the gospel in its visceral reality, and not in its Thomas Kinkadian counterfeit.
If they could–if we could–we would not look at Good Friday with nostalgia. But we would look at it, and, if God is merciful, we might never look away.
Letter & Liturgy 