Good Friday?

It's a strange thing, our language.  Good was good until good wasn't good enough of a descriptor anymore.  It had to be cool or awesome or excellent or rad.  But then it was no longer cool to be good.  It was good to be bad, which wasn't necessarily the same thing when someone called you bad when they meant good.  So bad was good and good was bad until some time further when it wasn't so cool to call someone bad when they meant good anymore.

Good is good again, I think, and I think it's also good to be good once more, but when we call this particular Friday good, I don't think people really understand why it was so good.  It wasn't because we made it good.  And it's not good just because we have the day off (well, most of you probably do).  We didn't do anything on that particular day to make it good.  In fact, we did something bad, something really, really bad.  What mainly characterizes Good Friday is the death of someone important, someone good, someone who didn't deserve to die but did.  In our book, it isn't good when someone innocent is murdered unjustly.  And to die by our hands and by our sins makes it even worse.  But can bad once again be good for our case here?

Things in the beginning were intended to be good.  Creation was good, and with man at the pinnacle of creation, it was said to be very good.  But good wasn't good enough; man wanted to define good in his own terms.  And that's when things went bad.  The problem with us defining good is that we barely know what good is supposed to entail.  Our perspective is limited to say the least, and we see good in very limited terms – it's usually understood as what's good for me and what's good for me in the here and now, which is, in fact, bad because we don't take into account others as well as the hereafter.  So our pain and suffering, which we oftentimes blame God for, they are just byproducts of us trying to create good for ourselves (which usually comes at the expense of others and our future).  How can a God who allows this be considered good?  Well for one, if He didn't, we wouldn't exist today.  Us existing today is a good thing, for us at least.  And God allowing us to bring about good, to redeem what was good is especially good.

God knows good.  And He knew that He had to communicate with us good on our level; we needed to know good in our vernacular.  That's why He chose a people – to reflect His good.  That's why He came as Jesus through that group of people – to help us to redefine our lives.  And that's why He willfully made the sacrifice He did – to redeem what was once good.  Good Friday is only good when we look at it with new eyes and new perspectives, when we look at it with new understandings and new definitions, when we see the visible and invisible, when we look at past, present, and future, encompassing all, not just our small bubble we live in, but the whole wide world around us.

What we must come to understand is that our definitions are severely lacking.  We think bad is good; we think lust is love; and we think mere existence is life.  If we want to know good, know love, and know life, God has to be a part of our vocabulary.

Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday marks the start of Jesus' final week in Jerusalem, and of a journey that every Christian must go through as they encounter Christ Jesus.  From our initial celebration of Him coming into our lives, to the sudden and unexpected death of our own idea and perception of who we thought He would be for us and what we thought He would do for us, to the life, meaning, and purpose He brings anew to us as we finally truly come face-to-face with who He really is:  we must come all the way through this journey, past the pomp and circumstance and all of its religious trappings and into a real relationship with the One and Only, else we deceive ourselves and others with an incomplete picture of the Messiah.  Following anything less is following in futility a false idol.  If you have walked the "Christian" experience and new life hasn't been found in Jesus, you have yet to encounter Christ face-to-face.