Today is Good Friday. Good Friday is the holiest day of the Christian year. It arrives as the culmination of the events of Holy Week. Jesus has entered Jerusalem on the back of a donkey’s colt, signifying the peace God has commanded, and He will bring. Jesus has been betrayed, arrested, falsely charged and tried, convicted, and sentenced to die on cross beams constructed for execution by binding and nailing to them the arms and hands, and legs and feet, of the Roman Empire’s worst criminals of the state, assuring death by suffocation and trauma shock.
One can ask, “How, then, can this be called Good Friday?” God shows us how. Death will be conquered by Resurrection. Sin will be repented, forgiven, and foregone. Hate will be vanquished by Love. War will give way to Peace.
The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, will deliver, re-order, and re-organize, the nature of the created order itself. In Christ Jesus, the crucified Redeemer, life will be reconstituted, remade, in the very nature of its being. Now, through the power of God the Father’s grace, and the obedience of God the Son’s redeeming sacrifice, His blood will wash away the repentant sinner’s guilt and cleanse and purify the trusting soul of sin, through God’s forgiveness, full and free. Glory to God!
In communal and social relations, between groups and among nations, might will no longer be normalized as right. Tooth and nail will no longer legislate dominance, and survival, in the bloody image of hate and conquest.
Instead, lives consecrated to God, and lived to honor God, will rise from death to resurrected life, through the power of the Resurrection. Praise the Lord!
On Resurrection morning, Jesus arose from death first! All others who trust God will now rise to new life, repentant and forgiven, justified in the power of the Resurrected One, washed clean by His blood, I repeat!. Hallelujah! God willed this transformation, and God made it so.
That was the message of the life, teaching, and sacrificial death of Jesus. That is the message now.
Not a one of the men who knew Jesus best had expected it. Not a one had fully understood what Jesus had taught. A few had caught glimpses. But none was ready to see Jesus die. Simon had recoiled and objected when Jesus had spoken of it, and was reproved by his Teacher. Later, Simon had drawn his sword and missed the centurion’s neck, but sliced off his ear. Jesus condemned this drawing of swords.
While Jesus prayed all night in the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples slept. While Jesus died, they hid. All but John. They could not see the unfolding of a new order of being, lived and embodied first in Jesus, the God-man they had followed for nearly three years. They were anxious, confused, and afraid for their own lives. But they would come to know and see and follow, without hesitation or fear! They would “turn the world upside down!” After the Resurrection!
The coming of Jesus had been a commandment of peace. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German pastor and theologian who refused to capitulate to Hitler’s co-opting of the German church in World War II, spoke those words then. Like Putin today, Hitler had lied to his nation. His blasphemous lies claimed his war was righteous, and that it agreed with the peace of the Gospel. Bonhoeffer stood against Hitler and challenged his lies. Having participated in a failed assassination attempt, he was imprisoned, and after two years, hanged in one of Hitler’s concentration camps only days before the end of the war.
Bonhoeffer had understood Jesus’ mission of peace and had preached the Lord’s words. Repeatedly, Jesus had spoken, and enfleshed, the peace He came to bring to a warring creation. This young pastor had died for that Truth.
The Prince of Peace arose from death in an immortal, glorified body suited for life eternal. Divine judgment had been made against a world which organizes itself around war and death.
War rages now in a world empowered by God’s grace, when obedient to Christ Jesus, to organize itself around peace, not war. Post-Resurrection, we can obey God’s commandment of peace. Let us pray for that.
Sunday is Resurrection Sunday. Our Lord is risen! Our Lord is Earth’s Prince of Peace. Let us “study war no more,” by obeying God’s commandment of peace given in the coming of Jesus our Christ and the power of His Resurrection.
And let us give the glory to God. All glory to His Name!
Thanks be to God.
Elizabeth Barnes is a native of Bladen County and now lives at White Lake. She taught Christian theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. She is a member of Beard’s Chapel Baptist Church.
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