Why Call Good Friday Good?
Good Friday Prayer from the Eastern Orthodox tradition:
Today He who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the Cross (three times).
He who is King of the angels is arrayed in a crown of thorns.
He who wraps the heaven in clouds is wrapped in the purple of mockery.
He who in Jordan set Adam free receives blows upon His face.
The Bridegroom of the Church is transfixed with nails.
The Son of the Virgin is pierced with a spear.
We venerate Thy Passion, O Christ (three times).
Show us also Thy glorious Resurrection
(my emphasis)
Good Friday is only Good (also called Holy or Great) only in relation to the Resurrection….as in the couplet of the prayer.
While veneration of The Cross and meditations upon the wounds and the sufferings of Jesus can lead to a morbid, psychologically dis-eased, and ultimately guilt-ridden narcissistic way of life, leading Christianity to be charged with being anti-human and necrophilic, a more ancient and paradoxically life-giving message I think can be found in the story.
Good Friday also evokes for too many (and thanks to too many horrible sermons) the notion of an angry god desiring blood in order to be appeased in his (always a his) wrath.
In this stream of Christianity, the world is a fallen trash heap and our true home abides elsewhere in heaven above. Calvary is the place where our boarding tickets are punched from the great journey out of this hell hole after death. We deserved much worse than we got and he paid the brutal price for our naughty selves.
And so on and so forth.
But looking at the earliest Christian sources (New Testament and the early Christian writers through the Patristic era) the theme of Good Friday is that, seen in the Light of Easter Sunday, death has been destroyed. A “New Age” has dawned whereby the older powers and principalities are overthrown by Love, who is God.
In that unforeseen and unexpected joy, The Cross, the symbol and the physical reality of the most horrid, vile, and fearful dark aspects of humanity, of existence itself, becomes the doorway into eternal life—beginning now in this life not only after death.
As Paul would say, “Death where is thy sting?”
The Cross, one of, if not the, most utterly tragic and horrifying deaths possible, can not forever defeat The Divine.
Or as Paul would exclaim (Romans 8: 35-37):
35Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’
37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
There is a place today to mourn and remember the millions, nay billions, (and when considering the lives of all creation, trillions) who suffer so unimaginably in this world. Who like Christ are crucified daily upon the altar of injustice, the mocking parody table of our world. Where people are paid not to grow food or to keep food in storehouses til it rots, while millions of others starve and go unfed.
There is a place for that meditation today. A place for mourning and forgiveness, for repentance from the ways of acting that cause so much suffering and stand opposed to God who is the Creator and Lover of all beings, but not to the point of becoming overwhelmed by grief and sorrow, unable to see The Light.
Christians in Kenya (and elsewhere I believe throughout sub-Saharan Africa) walk early in the morning on Sundays to their churches–usually ramshackle in nature–chanting:
“We have another world in view.”
That world is what The Bible calls Heaven. What Jesus called The Kingdom of God. Not an elsewhere located heaven, up in the sky, or somewhere beyond death, but one breaking-in to the very marrow of existence now. For the Christian, that heavenly world on earth is somehow already here but not fully manifest. In the not yet, the injustice and cruelty still reign, but in the already somehow they are not final.
Update I:
Just to clarify, if one does not hold to this Christian view, alternative interpretations abound. But to call the day “Good Friday” is already to assign the day (whether consciously or not) a Christian interpretive framework. As in the term Jesus Christ, which is itself a religious confession (not a neutral statement): Jesus is the Christ.
1. Jesus was a good being, even a social justice prophet who is gunned down by the machinery of the State and its terror. At its worst (imo) this view degrades into overwriting the iconography of Jesus as martyr onto the face of a psychopathic cold-blooded killer under the claim that he was “for the people”, when in fact Jesus stood against Zealots in his own day.
2. If Jewish, Jesus’ death as a righteous one is redeemed in The Holy One, as Jesus now rests with the other righteous, the countless murdered of Judaism (then and now) in the bosom of Abraham’s God, awaiting the general resurrection of all flesh. Given that the Cross was later used by Gentiles to strike holy terror and justify violence against Jews, this is doubly tragic.
3. If Gnostic, then Jesus only apparently died and his “death” is merely symbol of a larger spiritual (and usually therefore non-material) process.
Being an atheist, I’ve always preferred Neitzsche’s interpretation:
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Er, I mean, Nietzsche’s.Report
Nietzsche is always a welcome voice here at the League.Report
I don’t know… it seems more that Paul did exactly what he said in 1st Corinthians 9:22.
If you want an Earth God who is thirsty for blood and sacrifice, we’ve got that.
If you want a Sky God who could comprehend mankind as a man, to live, suffer, and die? We’ve got that.
What are you looking for? Here it is… and, keep in mind, those people who want something else? They’ve missed the point.
See you Sunday.Report
Like any good corporation, Christianity did its best to destroy pagan religions by coopting their holidays and adding their own theme to the event.
Easter is a pagan holiday celebrating the return of Spring.
Christmas is a pagan holiday celebrating the Midwinter Feast.
Many of the beliefs of Christians were taken (and slightly altered) from the beliefs of other religions. For example, the Cybele cult celebrated not only Cybele but her lover Attis. Attis was god of the ever-growing vegetation (just like Spring!). They believed that he was born of a virgin, and that he died and was reborn each year (even more like Spring!). The Cybele cult celebrated his death on a Friday, and then his resurrection three days later. Hmmm, where have I heard that before?Report
In fairness though the Cybele cult probably stole their idea from an even earlier cult.Report
Absolutely! Most likely, the story of Creation in Genesis came from the Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation myth).
The difference (to me) is that the Cybele cult didn’t work at destroying those other religions by coopting their holidays (even though they stole their ideas). That’s a big difference.
Imagine the uproar if Scientologists tried to coopt Easter or Christmas!
Beyond that, there is never any admission from Christianity that their “holy beliefs” are actually someone else’s “holy beliefs” that they stole and dressed up in Christian attire.Report
Say what you will about Cybele cults, at least they weren’t evangelical.
Funny how the evangelical ones are still around today…Report
Well, it’s a slippery slope if you start admitting that all your beliefs are not “chiseled in stone”, so to speak. How do you determine which are made by man and which are made by gods and goddesses?
But, the flip side is that you have to start contorting yourself to explain all the contradictions in your supreme beliefs.
Atheism is much easier and healthier! And, we get Sundays (and Saturdays) off! 🙂Report
I’ve got no problem with your atheism, it’s your moral imperative to provide health care to people that has me scratching my head.Report
Qué?Report
we need more open threadsReport
I suppose I have no more problem with atheistic moral imperatives on universal health care, than any other atheistic moral imperatives…Report
Amazing isn’t it, that everyone wasn’t more low-key about the whole thing at the time? I mean, on your account, this was the basic equivalent of a transition from the Mach-3 to the Quattro, and yet, people were freaking out about it then, and still are. Just goes to show you I guess, how much smarter we are now than people were back then.Report
Alright, I’ll put the snark away. I think the reductionistic account you offered above is facile and superficial. It’s like arguing that the Beatles and the Backstreet Boys are equivalent musically because they both had teenage girls for fans and sold a lot of records. In other words, you’ve hit on some superficial similarities, but missed the whole point (the quality of the music, or the revolutionary nature of Christian claims about the universe). You may not like the Beatles; you may not like Christianity; but either way it’s superficial and silly to say the Beatles are equivalent to the Backstreet Boys, or that Christianity was in its essentials a rip-off of the Cybele cults.Report
No, this would be like the Backstreet Boys stealing the lyrics, style, and guitar-riffs of the Beatles; then, changing their names to John, Paul, George and Ringo; then, changing their birthdays to the dates of John, Paul, George and Ringo; then, saying that “Beatles Day” is really “Backstreet Boys Day”; and then claiming that they – “in their essentials” – are unique and not at all like the Beatles.
Sorry that you are offended, John Henry, but this is the truth, and the truth hurts sometimes. Even for Christians.Report
The point is that you’re begging the question. In other words, if you’re a Christian, the fact that resurrection myths etc. have long been part of the human experience of religion is confirmation rather than a refutation of the truth of Christianity. In other words, the divine is not completely hidden from anyone, and all people have at various times had glimpses of what was better expressed in Christianity. If you reject Christianity, then the existence of these other experiences of the numinous are just as mistaken as Christianity, and whatever your preferred worldview is correct.
But, in either case, I would suggest the Christian claims about the world are radically different from the earlier pagan religions. Certainly, that was the universal opinion at the time, and it seems odd to me that these people wandered around the Roman empire getting crucified without ever once realizing that Christmas was the same thing as Saturnalias because they were celebrated on the same date.Report
That’s a great argument! (except for the fact that Christmas was declared as Jesus’ birth in 350 by Pope Julius I)
So, all those people wandering around Rome getting crucified didn’t think about Christmas and Saturnalias because Christmas wasn’t Christmas yet!Report
Right. That’s the point. Celebrating Christ’s birth has nothing to do with Saturnalias. The fact that the celebration was at some point moved to the same date as Saturnalias gives the lie to your claim that “Christmas is a pagan holiday celebrating the Midwinter Feast.” People were celebrating (and being killed for celebrating) Christmas quite apart from the Midwinter Feast for hundreds of years.Report
jhg,
Yes there are resonances at some level between pre-Christian Greco-Roman and Near Eastern myths, but the divergences are more significant I would say.
The dying god never became fully human nor became born of a poor woman (certainly not a Jewish one at that), been the son of a carpenter. Nor suffered such a public, humiliating, shameful, and excruciating form of death.
The more pertinent backdrop is not pagan religions but Judaism, since Jesus (and all his followers) were Jewish. In 2nd Temple Judaism, the righteous martyrs (like the woman and her sons in Maccabees) will be justified by God. They will be justified in the resurrection (see Update I, point #2).
The difference with what became Christianity is they said that Jesus was raised and the new age/end times had already broken through whereas for (non Jesus following) Judaism, the resurrection hasn’t happened at all yet.
Nor do the pagan myths of dying and rising gods talk about a new heaven and a new earth, redeemed flesh, and humans as the priests and servant rulers (as gardeners!!!) of the new liberated cosmos.
The Jewish-Christian story might indeed be wrong, but it’s significantly different than things like cult of Demeter.Report
It’s funny- my wife has been actively studying the pagan mysteries in the last few months, while I’ve been translating the Summa Theologica and doing other studies in Catholicism, so we were talking about this subject last night. There are, of course, resonances, but one big difference that we saw is that the Hebrew God is a god of precepts. The idea with the mysteries- at least as I understand it- is you’re making offerings and generally trying to stay on the good side of the divine order. However, I’ve not heard of a whole code of laws as in Leviticus. At one point, Democritus says we’re supposed to honor our vows to the gods, but it’s not clear to me what that means. The Israelites, meanwhile, were given an entire body of laws and a covenant that applied to the whole group as a mystical body. As for Jesus, there’s one point at which Paul basically says, hey, you needn’t be a Jew to be saved; membership is now open to everybody. So, my understanding is that Christianity sort of universalizes and rewrites the covenant. As for remaking the texture of the universe, I sort of understand that idea, but am not at the point in my reading of it being crystal clear. So these posts have been pretty helpful for me.Report
Chris, sometime I’d like you to expand on this: “Good Friday also evokes for too many (and thanks to too many horrible sermons) the notion of an angry god desiring blood in order to be appeased in his (always a his) wrath.” That is why do you think there was a Good Friday?
Voegelin: “For a gospel is neither a poet’s work of dramatic art, nor an historian’s biography of Jesus but the symbolization of a divine movement that went through the person of Jesus into society and history.”
Following FWC Von Schelling we are free, as God graciously intended, to embrace the truth of reality or to reject it. Even silly, amateur theologians who discuss concepts beyond their ken.Report
There are people other than Christians and pagans, you know, and for some of us Good Friday symbolizes oppression almost as awful as what the Roman Catholic Church is currently enduring.Report
see update I. Acknowledged. A truly sorrowful and shameful point.Report
This quote from that linked news report about the comments during the homily is essential to keeping perspective:
“Father Lombardi said the remarks should not be construed as equating recent criticism of the Catholic Church with anti-Semitism.
“ ‘I don’t think it’s an appropriate comparison,” he said. “That’s why the letter should be read as a letter of solidarity by a Jew.’ ”Report