The modern relevance of Good Friday

Father Paul Daly

Father Paul Daly, Parish Priest of Saint Joseph RC, Heywood shares the historical background to and the modern relevance of Good Friday.

An occupational hazard of mine is that, when travelling and in a conversation with strangers, once they ask me what I do for a living, the conversation travels down a very predictable route. It can go something like this: “I was brought up a Christian. I even went to a church school. I learnt my prayers and everything. But I don’t believe in God now.”

“Tell me about the God you no longer believe in.”

They go on to describe the image of God that they no longer believe in and are surprised when I say “I agree; I don’t believe in that God either.”

There are many reasons why some find it hard or impossible to carry on believing; painful personal tragedy being the most compelling.

And sometimes the ‘God’ we reject is a ‘God’ no one in their right mind would believe in. We rightly reject a ‘God’ who seems distant, remote, uncaring, able to lift a finger to sort out the mess and refusing to do so, therefore cold and unloving.

But that is not the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ, the Good Friday God.

Rather we see a God who could not stay away but had to enter in to our human story; a God who wants to save us, but not from the outside and above so much as from within; a God who took to himself the whole of the human condition, not picking and choosing the easy bits.

The death of Jesus is not about pleasing an angry God. Talking of ‘paying the price for our sins’, though very ancient, doesn’t seem to connect with a world without much of a sense of sin. The most helpful, to me at any rate, way I look at Jesus’ dying on the cross is as the final act of a life totally lived in faithfulness to his Father. What do I mean? Jesus is, Christians believe, God’s gift of Godself to the world. I said earlier that God wants to save the world from within. He wants to make salvation possible, not impose it. So he sent his Son, born of a woman, fully human as we are. God’s gift of Jesus bridges the gap between God and humanity, between heaven and earth. Jesus reveals God to us and makes it possible for us to meet God even this side of eternity. Jesus is God’s verdict on the world, a world that he entered into to become part of.

But what kind of a gift would it be if God snatched it back when people turned their back on God’s gift, ignored him, turned against him, rejected him? God’s unconditional love for the world, but with strings attached! God’s gift for all time, cut short and snatched to safety. No, God’s Son, in Jesus, took to himself the whole of our human condition; the laughter and the tears, the joys and sorrows, pleasure and pain, the triumph and the tragedy. Indeed, some go so far as to say that Jesus knew what it was like to feel such despair as to sense that he was cut off from God, Godlessness, crying out, as the Gospels say, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ One of the earliest statements of faith says that he ‘descended into hell.’

Does any of that matter? Does it make the slightest bit of a difference?

For a start, it means that no one need ever say ‘but does God care? Does God know what it’s like?’ Good Friday speaks to us of a God who went through it for us and ahead of us. Whatever we go through, therefore, we are never alone. How ever dark it gets, God is present even in the darkness. We may not sense his presence (feeling forsaken as Jesus did on the cross) but that does not mean he is absent.

Secondly, the cross, whatever cross it might be and however long it seems to take to carry it and how ever lonely the path we tread with it, never has to have the least word. The cross and the tomb need never be a dead end. We may still have to endure the agony of our own Good Friday, or stand beside others as they live through theirs; we may have to endure the seemingly endless wait of Holy Saturday and the night that seems to go on for ever; but Easter will dawn. That is the hope that sustains us and the light that guides our steps.