Day 3323 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 19:30 NIV

Often in life we fear the finish for its finality, but perhaps it’s what we find in the finish that should determine where our fear is found.

For many things in life reach an ending, as such is simply the promise the temporality. And that inevitability has even brought about many a cliché which usually tend to carry a slight resemblance of truth despite their overuse and lack of proving pertinent within most situations in which we settle to pulling out their tired attempts to make something make sense. Yes, we’ve all heard such obviousness as that all good things must come to an end. But so too that good things come to those who wait.

And alas life has become this disheveled uncertainty between waiting in hopes of good or rather rushing ahead to ensure good enough is found before the ground falls out.

But I fear that what we’ve found inside such a disconcerting consideration is a particular breed of impatience that’s inspired inside only this idea that we’ve either managed to retain or rather need to maintain a certain sense of control, of strength, of certainty within life and all we seek to do or be or become while in it. We’ve become a people so impatient in fact that we deny the very presence of an end’s inevitability, thinking that should we simply ignore the impending that perhaps we might miss it and thus never need agree to it.

Yet what if our impatience has left us rushing so fast from what we can’t avoid that we’ve long lost sight of the salvation behind the sacrifice? What if we’ve become so afraid of fear that we now instead fear everything else? What if our eyes have become so affixed to our assumptions that we’re missing the moments which are both proving and providing life’s meaning right before us?

Yes, what if from here inside this rush to find what life should mean we’ve only run right past the point in which life ended, accomplishing for us the new beginning we’ve always known we needed without the courage to admit we couldn’t find it?

For that is indeed what Good Friday is all about. It’s always been something that seemed a fairly strange title in regard to the events which transpired upon that day so many years ago. How is any of it good? What good was done in all we saw or all that was seen, in all that we few claim to believe? No, rather than good it seems a day of remembrance of a moment in which our eyes saw one thing, and our dead hearts couldn’t see anything beyond it.

That’s the good in Good Friday. That from within His end, our new began. That His choice to suffer became a sudden bolt of life striking right into the heart of those who He knew would get the meaning behind the message. It’s that He embraced His end, the end we thought we’d thrust upon Him as if He would be led where He didn’t want to go, as if our selfish semblance of power might force upon Him an outcome He Himself was not aware of nor able to avoid.

He was by all means and in every way able to do as the many shouted from their blindness and blaspheme. He could indeed have saved Himself, but no. No such was not His purpose as such was not His promise. And so saving Himself couldn’t have been His premise. It was instead to save those who couldn’t save themselves. To help those who needed more help than He did. It was to forgive those who didn’t know, who couldn’t see that they were those addressed in verses like that of Revelation 3:17.

It was to get through the mindset that had us saying that we were rich, that we’d acquired wealth, that we had enough health, that we were doing better than fine within our way of life leaving us blind. It was to help us see that we were, that we are “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

That’s the good as it’s those circumstances, those concessions, those confusions that He finished within those three words and the final surrender which followed.

Because such have defined our misunderstood understanding of life and all that’s done, all that we do within it. We’ve come to embody wretchedness, wickedness, wantonness. We’ve pursued the path of popularity and politics all the way to being only pitiable and pathetic, poor in ways worse than not having wealth. In what ways? Fair question as to us in this world, well, worldly wealth is paramount, and so yes, what might be worse than being financially poor?

Being blind in both sight and soul. Being naked in terms not of physical appearance nor lack of apparel but rather baring our every indiscretion and idiocy before the One who’s seen all we’ve done and arrived at the decision to die to atone for it. Yes, being wicked is worse than being poor as to be poor is to be without money or material whereas wickedness wastes us in ways that not even money could repair should we have plenty to spend.

No, the good in Good Friday is that His good paid what we couldn’t to buy what we wouldn’t.

That’s why we’ve this day an opportunity to celebrate what so many still assume only an end. For many here are still as blind as any have ever been. There are many who look to the cross and see only the loss. They hear the story of Calvary and hear only a catastrophe of the sort of proportions that our rampant impropriety cannot abide. They’ve remained within the sort of misplaced assumption that had those back on that hill jeering and judging as their Savior took His last few breaths that they might have the chance to one day breathe in Heaven’s peace.

And that’s why His end is where our faith begins, and friends, it gets no better than that!

But yet still, there is indeed a strange blending of mixed emotions found and felt by most this day. He did truly die after all. Seems an entirely morbid thing to celebrate. Death. Destruction. The darkness which demanded such a display of disdain and the most disturbing and delusional depravity ever designed by mankind. Yes, that is another aspect that sometimes catches my mind open to pondering. That we’re the ones who thought up crucifixion, and yet that we’re the ones who claim we care, that we love, that we have both compassion and kindness within in.

No, we merely know the words without His work as nothing good can come from we who’ve sold off every hint at that image in which we were made. In fact I dare say the only good to be found in us is the truth that He died for us and that He must have had a reason. Because if we were to be honest, another goodness scarcely in us, we’d be unable to admit that we’ve been anything but horrid to both ourselves and to one another. For such is the standard settlement shared amongst mankind.

That it’s okay to hate, okay to harm, okay to hurt for things as insignificant as disagreement.

Is not such why Christ was, is hated? Disagreement. Was the world’s insistence upon His death not due to a difference of opinion, of perspective, of priority? And is such not still enough for us to start wars, to attack our brothers, to look lustfully upon our sisters, to steal from our neighbors, to lie to our friends? Yes, it does seem as though we’ve still managed to find little good even all these years later, and perhaps even less reason to look anymore.

Because I think we all know what we’d find, how we’d feel. I think we know that were we to look for ways to improve life, to love more, to be more kind and compassionate and considerate and caring, I think we know we’d have to eventually come back to our being part of all the above being undermined and rarely shown. Yes, I think were we to legitimately care for better, to ache for more, to embrace the opportunity to improve beyond what we’ve become, well, we’d have to face what we’ve become.

And alas that sort of thing demands the sort of humility seen inside Jesus’ suffering for crimes He didn’t commit and sins He’d never known.

But perhaps that’s the ultimate hope of Good Friday. Humility. That from down here where all we assume is ourselves better than we’ve ever actually been, that we might look up someday to see that we’ve fallen so very far that we cannot make it to where hope is found on our own. That we might one day find the courage to look at the cross and not do as we’ve always done and seek ways in which to look past it as if such is beneath us.

It most certainly isn’t as that was in fact my cross. It was your cross. It was our cost as due and to be demanded of us at some point. And yet in that exchanging of places seen in His taking ours upon His shoulders and then into His hands and into His feet, perhaps we find the proof of love existing only inside humility. For what greater love has any than to lay down their life for their friends?

Well, truth be told there is an even greater love, and it’s so good that it did what nothing else could and made the death of Calvary something in which to be grateful. For in Christ is found a love that laid down His life for His enemies. You tell me what could be better than that?

Truth is we know of nothing anywhere even close. Because it’s not possible, especially within this world and what we’ve made of it. No, here we make enemies of everyone, everything. If it offends or affronts, if it agitates or aggravates, if any speak a sound or share a thought that seems in any way disagreeable with our preconceived concessions, well, the war is on and rage is the only language we know to speak as the gloves come off and our guards go to work.

That’s why we need Jesus as much today as we didn’t know we needed Him then. Because we’re still cast upon the chaos of a culture consumed with calamity and compromise. We’re still within a world wrought and writhing with wickedness and want. You and I are in every way at every risk of either failing to find or finding then forgetting the good that does exist in life, in hope, in peace, in faith. Because this world hates faith, and so many are doing all they can to convince us we should too.

But friends, as that pressure mounts and the odds rise and the risks grow, we need to remember the victory He won and everything such an accomplishment entails. For in His death, we’ve now the chance to share. To embrace the suffering that this world thinks will inspire us to give up and shut up. We have the chance to let Him lead us to the courage to welcome whatever cost this world of the lost may insist we pay for following His path and sharing His truth. We have the opportunity to never again worry about loss of life as in Him is found a life so unending that not even death could win.

You see, that’s just it. When He said “It is finished”, He meant everything. He plans. His promises. His purpose. His victory. But so too our old ways, old lives, old eyes and blind minds that kept us from seeing the gravity of His grace as much as agreeing to our place in that grave. It’s all finished. He overcame the worst we’ve done, the wickedness of this world, the amount of insanity we’ve seen and sown. He paid for it all.

But not all will accept that they owed. And that’s where Good Friday, Easter Sunday, next Wednesday, the following Tuesday, that’s where it all falls now on us to either let His truth sink into our souls or to do as most intend to and refuse to welcome the cost of crosses carried.

I think that’s maybe one of the most beautiful parts of this whole Easter story that we don’t really talk about much, as it’s a perspective that we maybe still struggle to see. That crosses accomplish what needs to be done in ways that clinging to our way of living and thinking and assuming simply can’t. He took up our cross both to atone for our sins, but so too to show that such surrendering and humility are entirely possible. And that they’re even, in Him at least, survivable.

In fact, that’s the beginning that we can find in His ending. That we now get to take up our crosses and seek starting today to live in such a way that doesn’t lead us to adding to what He already went through. That because of His mercy, we might now have the courage to take our stand against everything that’s stood against us. Yes, Good Friday has given us a good fight, a fight for more, a fight against the less we’ve become, the least we know we’ve settled for.

There is indeed so much good in this day. For today more than perhaps any other is indeed the day the Lord has made as upon that hill He did as He promised and made a way for us to live both now and forever. And in that we shall rejoice. Not because we celebrate His suffering, but rather because His suffering gave us something to celebrate when that stone gets shoved out of His way in a couple of days.

May we share in every aspect of all that Easter weekend is: Death, burial, resurrection. End, loss, beginning. Because it is finished, and thus all that’s left is for us to finish with it ourselves. Sin and self, fear and failure. Let them go for that’s why He came, that we might die to sin and live life again.

And that my friends is a truly good thing, even though such a gift came at a price none of us can understand.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold