GOOD FRIDAY

 

He knew, ahead of time, that He would pay with His Life for ALL the unspeakable evil in this world….AND HE DID IT ANYWAY.

Two weeks ago I posted ONVOORWAARDELIKE LIEFDE DEUR ONBESKRYFLIKE LYDING(UNCONDITIONAL LOVE THROUGH INDESCRIBABLE SUFFERING), a reflection of a journey I undertook last year to discover the details of Jesus’ crucifixion on my Afrikaans blog, VrygekoopteBaanbreker.  I translated portions of that for use in this reflection.  Truth be told, I was left dumbstruck last year.  The diabolical level of sadism with which Jesus was slaughtered, silenced me into mute heartbreak.  After Easter weekend, I wrote the following words on a blank page,

How on earth did this, what appears to be, oxymoronic schizophrenic-like turn of events take place?  How did these people go from selfless acts of righteous worship on Palm Sunday to becoming a reckless mob of bloodthirsty murderous savages on Good Friday, hellbent on self-righteous vengeance?

I decided to continue my journey this year, starting with a quest to find applicable answers to last year’s questions.  I had to find out what happened between Palm Sunday and Good Friday.  I started out with indignant anger toward the fickle people who had the audacity to first praise and then curse the Son of God.  However, as I progressed on the journey to discovery, my anger was sobered into a humble conviction of my own fickleness and my indignation was replaced by deep new insights into the nature of Jesus’ redemptive gift to us.  I believe that my renewed revelation of Jesus, my Redeemer, will have a profound impact on my understanding of and desire to honour Him with my writing, as RedeemedPioneer.

Before Palm Sunday:

Before Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, amongst other things, He had taught many people through story-telling (parables) and performed multiple miracles.  It appeared that He chose to rather connect with the stinky, sinful and unclean rejects of society and heal their diseases.  He connected with the embarrassed wine-less hosts of a wedding and turned their water into wine.  He connected with tens of thousands of people and fed all of them from the content of a single young boy’s lunch box.  He connected with the deaf and restored their hearing.  He connected with the blind and restored their sight.  He connected with a woman who had her all her dignity pillaged from her due to a blood disorder illness she suffered from and who was likely the ultimate outcast of outcasts.  He healed her and restored her dignity.  He connected with a desperate father and raised his daughter from the dead.  He connected with a friend and raised him from the dead.  He connected with His followers, even when they were scared amidst a devastating storm at sea.  He walked on the water towards them, calmed the storm and got into the boat to comfort them.  He felt the pain and suffering of vulnerable people in a broken world, had COMPASSION for them and intentionally CONNECTED with them.

On Palm Sunday:

Jesus enters Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.  Large crowds of people line the streets and they worship Him in reverence and awe, honouring Him as the Messiah.  Palm branches and clothing are spread on the ground as an outward token of welcoming adoration, fit for a King.  Shouts of praise can be heard from everywhere and the atmosphere is filled with joyful anticipatory excitement.  I believe Jesus looks at the crowd with COMPASSION and He intentionally makes eye contact with people in the crowd.  He has COMPASSION for those who reciprocates CONNECTION with Him.  He has COMPASSION for those who are still conflicted about CONNECTION with Him.  He even has COMPASSION for those who have already rejected CONNECTION with Him in their hearts, knowing that soon the shouts from their mouths will be a public display of the overflowing of hate from their hearts.  He knows exactly what is coming, but He doesn’t bail out, He goes ahead.

Between Palm Sunday and Good Friday:

Amongst the many things Jesus does during these few days, He tells more parables and He cracks the whip on injustice.  Purifying the temple from injustice involves Him using an actual whip.  However, addressing the Teachers of the Law and Pharisees, He uses a figurative whip in His WOE-speech.  I suspect that with this speech, Jesus assisted them in the completion of their transition from INDIFFERENT to RECKLESSLY HOSTILE.  To them, Jesus had now become public enemy number one and they would have to do whatever it takes to maintain control and influence over the people.  Jesus knows exactly what is coming, that His time is running out, He sweats blood in anxious anticipation, but He doesn’t bail out, He goes ahead.

Good Friday:

The day of the unspeakable arrives.  Upon Jesus’ arrest, hot-tempered Simon Peter lashes out and chops off the ear of a Roman soldier.  Jesus has COMPASSION for the soldier, CONNECTS with him and restores his ear back to the healthy before-state.  The disciples abandon Jesus and scatter.  The worst endgame in the history of the world starts and every element thereof  escalates to the most extreme level.  Abandonment.  Rejection.  Humiliation.  Torture.  Pain.  Suffering.  Abuse.  Cursed.  Mocked.  Taunted.  Shamed.  He was stripped naked and tied to a pillar where He was savagely beaten and scourged into a horror-like state which no longer resembled that of a human being.  This left Him with multiple deep lacerations and areas where chucks of flesh were ripped from His body.  Due to these grave injuries, His skeletal bones were visible in certain places.  A crown of thorns was forced into his scalp.  He was suffering unspeakably excruciating pain and it was still far from being over.  In this state, He was driven, like an animal, to a hill where He was nailed to a cross, which was raised into the air and dropped into a hole where He had to hang until His ultimate death.  The 18cm nails were not sterile, surgical instruments.  When they were driven into His wrists and feet, none of His bones were broken, but it severed and pinched His nerves.  Hyper activation of multiple pain receptors must have overwhelmed the transportation of pain signals in His central nervous system and flooded His brain.  In His brain these signals would have been decoded to register the kind of pain I would assume to be a combination of the worst possible case of shingles (inflammation of nerve endings), a dentist drilling into multiple nerves without anaesthesia, and pinched nerves in multiple body parts.  Only, I am convinced that it was orders of magnitude worse than my attempt at a description thereof AND it did not cease until it drained ALL the life out of Him. The nails were dirty, and even possibly, contaminated with leftover blood from previously executed prisoners.  When He finally hung there, humiliated and helpless, His already-off-the-charts-excruciating pain was even further exacerbated by the development of infection due to bacterial involvement as well as the uninhibited attack from flying, burrowing insects which tunnelled their way into His eyes and open wounds.  It is believed that He ultimately died as a result of a catastrophic cardiac event.  His suffering, inflicted through diabolical torture, ended when His heart literally ruptured.  He knew exactly what was going to happen to Him and HE DID IT ANYWAY!

During translation of my Afrikaans reflection about the detail of Jesus’ crucifixion, I realised that I am still intensely traumatised by the sheer brutality thereof.  My trauma of His trauma.  TRAUMA.  Jesus Christ truly is the Lamb of God Who was slaughtered as Ultimate Sacrifice to redeem man back to God.  Jesus understands everything there is to understand about trauma.  Yes, His trauma killed Him on Good Friday, but when He rose again on Resurrection Sunday, He overcame death and the trauma which caused it.  As Christ-followers and grateful recipients of His Life-gift to us, we can look forward to a trauma-free eternity with Him, but while we still reside in our fragile human bodies in this broken world, none of us are exempt from pain and suffering nor the trauma it may bring. 

So, in conclusion, I am convinced that I will be on this particular journey for an undetermined time and what I have learned so far, is but a drop in the ocean.  I will, however, share some of it here.

As I said before, Jesus had COMPASSION for people and He CONNECTED with them.  He did so for every single person He performed a miracle for.  I would say that the majority of the recipients of Jesus’ miracles were considered to be outcasts and rejects by society’s norms.  I believe that when He healed their iniquities and diseases, He also healed them from their trauma.  The compound trauma inflicted upon them not only by the disease itself, but also from the rejection when society pushed them out because of it.  It dawned on me that poor personal hygiene could well have caused a disturbingly pungent stench around these people, because rotting flesh, old blood and other bodily fluids carry a distinct putrid smell.  Jesus was not deterred by this.  It would appear that Jesus had special COMPASSION for women and in particular for prostitutes and that He CONNECTED with them in a way nobody had ever done before.  I recently learned that research indicate that a heartbreaking 90% of prostitutes (sex workers in today’s terminology) had been victims of sexual abuse in their younger lives.  I suspect that Jesus knew that, even then, that He understood their trauma and that He understands the trauma of ALL sexual abuse victims hearbreakingly well.

Jesus’ WOE-speech to the Teachers of the Law and Pharisees is still just as applicable to the church today as it was back then.  An alarming portion of the church fail to have COMPASSION for and CONNECTION with people.  Backbiting and pride separate the different parts of the Body of Christ.  There exist staggering examples of hypocrisy in some churches today.  ForbesFortune500 ministries with pastors boasting obscene net worths.  Revival-hunting movements only interested in the next move of God, like addicts desperate for a next fix.   Empire-building leaders with executive powers acquired from the corporate world to hire silent followers and fire anyone who challenges them.  I can only imagine how much it saddens Jesus to see how people assign themselves the authority to take scripture out of context and then build flawed theologies around it and mislead people.  Precious souls turn away from Jesus Christ to embrace agnosticism and atheism because people claiming to be representatives of Christ mislead, hurt and ultimately, push them out.  Exactly what Jesus warned about in His WOE-speech and the polar opposite of what He did in His ministry.  As Christ-followers, we are building His church in a broken world.  The picture of this world is not pretty, it is shockingly ugly.  Children are raped and sold into sex slavery.  Young parents get cancer and die, leaving behind young spouses and infant children.  Old people are robbed of their hard-earned money and fall victim to exploitation.  Health and financial stability and are not determined by faith.  In every church in every country in the world, there are precious people who suffer from all forms of trauma.  The least spoken-about of all the traumas, is sexual trauma.  We can no longer look the other way and pretend to pray it away.  Almighty God still performs miracles today, but He does so at His discretion and in His timing.  He is most certainly not a genie-in-a-good-weather-bottle who grants wishes to saints in order to guarantee prosperity and impeccable health.  He is also not in the habit of deputising saints with His authority to stand in for Him as if He is unable to do so at times.  I find it so refreshingly interesting that Jesus uses the example of a hen collecting and protecting her chicks under her wings to illustrate His (essential mothering) desire for His children (us).

I am grateful for and blessed to have found a church made up of fickle people, just like me, and together we have COMPASSION for and intentionally CONNECT with people.  Jesus knew beforehand that He had to pay for ALL the evil in the world with His life and every drop of His precious blood AND HE DID IT ANYWAY!  He is the Rock of our salvation and our faith is anchored in Him.  We marvel at His goodness and whether He chooses to perform miracles or not, our hope stays securely in Him.

Today is Good Friday which reminds me that the perfect Passover Lamb is my Redeemer.  The day after tomorrow is Resurrection Sunday which reminds me the my life is in Him and He set me free to pioneer.