May be the true meaning of Good Friday
Excerpted from Peter Wehner, “The Greatest Contribution of Christianity” in The Atlantic.
The events on the cross mean that God doesn’t just have sympathy for those who suffer; he enters into suffering. He is not a distant God. He has entered into the human drama, and he didn’t escape without wounds.
God can empathize with my experience. It’s reassuring to believe that heartbreak and suffering, even tears, aren’t alien concepts to Jesus. This doesn’t repair what is shattered; it doesn’t reclaim what is lost. But it does make the loss more tolerable. I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it’s a sense of feeling known, a kind of solidarity in suffering.
The movement started by Jesus and a handful of his followers had, within three centuries, changed the world. This wasn’t because the adherents of that movement gained control of the kingdoms of this world; it wasn’t because they rallied around leaders who would exact vengeance, even leaders who claimed to do so in the name of Christianity.
They changed the world because they sought to serve rather than to be served. Because they were known for their mercy, their forbearance, their kindness, and their grace. Because they were peacekeepers and justice seekers. And because they cared for those whom Jesus called “the least of these.”
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Blaska’s Bottom Line: We’re not terribly religious — and we already have enough Bibles, thank you very much. But the world needs religion, a belief in a higher Being, a greater cause, than the arrogance of man. Do we not also need …