Have you ever wondered why Good Friday is called Good Friday? For me, every Friday is Good Friday. Judging by Facebook and Twitter on Friday mornings, for most people all Fridays are Good Friday. So why is this "Good"?
It is not clear why this day is called Good Friday. It is primarily in English speaking countries that this day is called Good Friday. Others call it Holy Friday, Great Friday, or Suffering Friday. There is no consensus why it is called Good Friday in the English language.
My view is that it should actually be called Good News Friday, or Gospel Friday. Gospel is an old archaic word, so I prefer Good. It is a Friday that kicks off the conclusion of the Gospel story, the Good News story. Gospel means Good News. But what is this good news?
Well the story goes like this....Thousands of years ago, God, who is Father Son and Spirit decided to create humans in his image. So, in the image of the Son, he created humans. His objective was to adopt humans into the triune life of the Father Son and Holy Spirit. This life between Father, Son and Spirit is characterized by love, sharing, glorifying one another and mutual sharing of all that they have. "Jesus said "what is yours is mine, and what is mine is yours"
After being created, humans were given a paradise to live in. A garden which was full of food. However, God wanted humans to be free moral agents. You see, love cannot be coerced. It cannot be demanded. So God did not want to tell humans to love him by force. So he placed the symbolic tree of knowledge of good and evil, which if eaten, is like a drug or a poison. It kills whoever eats it eventually. So the first two humans, a husband and wife, called Adam and Eve (not Steve) ate the forbidden fruit, and introduced death amongst humans. Death is absence of life. Life is found in God. His essence is life. Apart from him there is no life.
With humans having sinned and become corrupted, diseased, and started decaying, what was God to do? It would not be in his nature to simply say, "Well, I tried, let them perish." No, that would be unlike God, and God cannot be untrue to himself. He is also truth in his essence. What do you do when something that you made out of love and is highly prized gets damaged? Do you through it in the dustbin? Of course, not! You do everything in your power to fix it and return it to its original condition. That is what God did. For he loved the world so much, that he gave his only son, Jesus, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. Jesus in whose image humans were made became a human. So, in his becoming a son of man, he was making sons of man sons of God. He needed to become flesh and blood like us, in our death prone condition, so that he could heal us of death.
Jesus was then born of a Virgin Mary by the power of the Spirit. He lived and grew to be a man. He was arrested, tried for treason and blasphemy even though he was God. He was executed like a criminal with two other criminals. Good Friday is the day many Christians celebrate and remember that execution.
He was executed together with two criminals. One on his right, and one on his left. The two criminals represented two types of humans. One that believes that Jesus is indeed the Son of God, and the other that does not believe he is the son of God. Which one are you? Do you believe, or don't you believe? This Good Friday you can join the one criminal who believed, and you too can join Christ in paradise.
God bless you!
