What Makes Good Friday Good? The Two Billion Dollar Question

As a child I used to enjoy sleepovers at my Nanna & Nonno's house, who being devout Italian Catholics had adorned every room with a crucified Christ. As I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, I would eye the spectacle warily in the darkness — or was it eyeing me? I must admit I was a little afraid. But going down the hallway to my sister’s room was out of the question, for a great statue of Mary loomed at the far end and the prospect of facing that in the darkness was far worse. I would huddle under the blankets and eventually fall asleep.

Yet now the image of Christ on the cross has huge significance for me, not perhaps as much significance as an empty cross (He is risen!) but significance all the same. 

It would seem that the crucifixion of Christ also has much contemporary significance, given that two thousand years later we hold a public holiday to commemorate it. A recent article in the Financial Review estimated that the economical cost to hold a public holiday is about two billion dollars.

So then, the two billion dollar question: What makes Good Friday good? 

Isn't it simply the day we attribute to Jesus' suffering and death on the cross?

Well yes, but some things are not as they first seem.

You see, when Jesus breathed the words, "It is finished," on a cross outside Jerusalem, the powers that be revelled in a seemingly unambiguous victory. 

The man who had claimed to be the Messiah - the coming king to whom the whole earth would bow in allegiance — hung safely and securely dead over the very city into which he had just ridden into claiming his kingship. 

He wasn't the first and he wouldn't be the last. At least this particular uprising was quelled quickly.

Or was it? 

There were immediate signs that this Messiah's death was not solito negotium (business as usual), nor was it an unambiguous victory. For one, a thick darkness settled over the land lasting three hours, the earth had shaken and rocks split open, tombs had spewed their inhabitant forth and ghosts were seen lurking in the streets. 

The Jewish temple sent reports that the massive curtain separating the altar from the ark of the covenant (on which God's presence was said to rest on the wings of cherubim), had supernaturally torn in two.

That's not the worst of it either. The very Roman centurion who participated in the execution and then witnessed these other-worldly events suddenly exclaimed, "Truly this was the Son of God!" (Matt 27:54). 

The enemy had overplayed its hand. 

For Jesus of Nazareth was not just another human Messiah whose rebellion was routed in a routine Roman crucifixion. As the centurion himself testified, he was the Son of God. He was also God the Son: Jesus was God incarnate. 

You can't kill God on a cross. You can't kill God at all. 

So while evil was relishing in a sure-fire victory, holding nothing back, dishing out all the human cruelty it could muster, God was absorbing it into Himself, rendering it defeated, no longer able to hold humanity under its sovereign rule of sin and death. 

Sin thus stripped of its power could no longer separate God from His creation.

Rather than a victory, evil suffered a crushing defeat. 

It is finished indeed.

In God's topsy-turvy kingdom, the cross, hitherto an instrument of death, became an instrument of life, as God's love for the world became manifest in His own body broken for the world. 

And so on Good Friday, we celebrate a good God. 

A good God who threw Himself in front of the cosmic train of our own self-destruction, to rescue us from the mess and the mission of the fallen world we live in. 

A good God who allowed Himself to be nailed to a cross on behalf of us all, removing the power of sin and death from our lives.

A good God who invites us to join Him in this revolution, declaring Jesus as our Lord, Saviour, Judge, and King.  

A good God, who through his sacrifice offers us eternal life.

A good God who "so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him, shall no perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16). 

That’s what makes Good Friday good.

And for today, it's not my two bob worth as usual, it's a nationally celebrated two billion worth. 

Picture: The 17th-century painting Christ Crucified by Diego Velázquez, held by the Museo del Prado in Madrid