Good Friday

            What does today mean for you? What does the cross mean to you? Is it a pendant strung around your neck? Is it a symbol propped up around your home? It is far away and foreign and you couldn`t even put words to its meaning? Is today the day you go to a church service with the family instead of going out with friends? Is today just another day where you forget that some may call it, "good friday?" 

             Instead of focusing today on what good friday may mean to you, I challenge you to put yourself into the steps taken that day by Jesus and even God himself. What did good friday mean for them? Recount the steps of the day from morning until dusk where Christ became sin. What do those words mean? He became our sin. He felt forsaken and cried out to the God of the universe to not leave him alone. Christ literally walked into hell and allowed the full wrath of God to be placed upon his shoulders. How do you think God himself felt in those moments leading up? Watching his son suffer and die?

"Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith." [W. H. Auden]

“The highest act of love is the giving of the best gift, and, if necessary, at the greatest cost, to the least deserving. That’s what God did. At the loss of His Son’s life to the totally undeserving, God gave the best gift –the display of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.”  [John Piper]

          What was the purpose? What was the meaning for God and for Christ himself?