GOOD FRIDAY

It's April 22^nd, 2011, Good Friday. Because Good Friday is a day in which Christians all around the world remember Christ's death, I would like to spend some time myself remembering and meditating on the crucifixion of our Lord, and I'd like to invite you to come along with me. I'm going to look at three different angles, or vantage points, of the crucifixion of Jesus and what we can take from each. Join me as I look at the crucifixion from the most common perspective, Christ's death in relation to us and what we gained as a result, a slightly less common vantage point of Jesus' followers, his disciples, and those closest to him the night this beautifully tragic event occurred and what they may have gone through, and then a vantage point that is rarely looked at, the Crucifixion from the perspective of God, what He did, why He did it, and what He got as a result. In doing this, I hope to paint a picture that has both vivid lights and deep darks which, when put together, create a rich image of what happened on that horrible magnificent day when Christ crawled up on that old rugged cross.

The first perspective, the view from our seats right here, is widely spoken of, so I won't spend a whole lot of time on it, just enough to get the point across. The plain and simple of it, as any street evangelist will tell you, is that Christ died to pay for our sins. It all started back in Genesis 3. After Adam and Eve broke the first ever command of God – do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or you will surely die – and they were naked, scared and ashamed, God came to them and covered their nakedness and shame. It's easy to miss. It's a little verse revealing mercy amidst the chaos of God's judgment. Verse twenty-one of chapter 3 says “And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” Did you catch that? In their nakedness and shame, God, instead of taking their lives as he said he would, sacrificed other creatures to cover them. He created garments of skins. You can't make a garment out of the skin of something that's still alive. The creation story is, of course, a poem. This, I believe, is figurative language illustrating a truth about our relationship with God. This idea continues as God give the Israelites the sacrificial system by which their sins, the short comings, there nakedness and shame is atoned for. The Israelites were able to bring their sins, through a priest, to God and then kill other creatures to cover their sins. This was a life debt being paid. Our life is in our blood; without blood, we have no life. So we exchange our blood for the blood – the life – of another of God's creatures, as he did for us in the Garden. Because we are the pinnacle of God's creation, anything that is killed in our stead is an imperfect sacrifice, and thus is only a temporary solution. This is why every year the sacrifice would be made. Every year this would be repeated. God would allow us to cover our sins, our shame and nakedness, with the life of lesser creatures. But God, in His divine providence, in a small town outside of Jerusalem called Bethlehem, provided a sacrifice that would once and for all cover our sins. Forever. Since there's nothing in creation that can serve as our replacement in death, God became a man and did it himself. This brings us the Cross. To Good Friday. God, sacrificing Himself so that our sins, our shame, our nakedness, our broken and fallen state can be covered perfectly and permanently. Simply put, God, Jesus, died so that we might live. Jesus gets crucified, we get saved from death. God gets death, we get life. It's a propitiation. A replacement, a transaction in which one person's debt, namely me, you, the person you passed at the supermarket, the person who cut you off in traffic, is settled by another person's payment, namely God in Jesus Christ. But it's so much more than that. We'll look more deeply at the other side of this transaction in a moment. But first, let's look at what was going on down on the ground as this beautiful debacle was taking place.

Try for a moment to put yourself in the shoes of the disciples of Jesus as he was teaching, performing miracles, ticking off of the Pharisees and getting away with it, and loving folks like no one has ever loved them before. This man is amazing, astounding, and if you're following him, I mean really following him, taking his teachings to heart and applying them to your life, you're convinced that this man is who he says he is: the very Son of God, the long awaited and prophesied Messiah. Put yourself in Jerusalem at the time of the Triumphal Entry of Jesus (Matthew 21). He comes into town in a kind of royal procession, he cleanses God's temple, puts the corrupt religious elite in their place. You think to yourself “This is it! It's really happening! Jesus, the Messiah is going to reclaim our promised land and re-establish Israel as the great Kingdom it once was in all of the glory of King David and King Solomon. The time has come, finally!” Now take that expectation, that love that you feel for the Man that has healed so many, possibly even YOU, and befriended the un-friend-able, that excitement for God and His people and the rich history that is fueling it, pushing it forward like a freight train speeding full tilt down a hill – He's really going to do it! This is it – and bring that energy, that momentum, to the hill outside of Jerusalem where Jesus has just been crucified and killed. Stop reading for moment and just let that sink in.

Can you imagine the heart break? Can you imagine that shear indescribable, soul shattering pain that these people went through? This is a broken heart wrapped in a humiliating defeat covered in a fear of death and tied off with a broken faith. There's no sugar coating this. This is excruciating pain. This is the kind of pain that is purely emotional, but is so incredibly intense that it manifests itself in painful ways in the physical. The bitter weeping that had to have been going on. This is the kind of heart break where your heart feels like it's physically breaking open, ripping in two. This is misery. This is agony and anguish. This is Good Friday. But I can't stop on that note. Let's take a look at what God saw.

To view Good Friday, the cross, from this vantage point, we need to position ourselves in Genesis 1 and 2 to get the proper view. In Genesis 1, we find the beginning of the creation poem. This is a far-off view of what God did at the beginning of time. To sum it up, in an overflow of his own creativity, God created all that is. The universe. Light, dark, land, water, day, night, stars, trees, fish, bugs, heaven, earth, everything flowed out from his mouth as he uttered the words of creation. When everything was in place, all as he wanted it, he said to himself, “Let us create man”. And then, out of an overflow of his own love, he created humanity. We can take a couple things from this. First, God loves us. We are the only creature, the only single species (if you want to call us that) that he specifically called into existence by name. Everything else he called into existence with a general word of creation; the seas and everything living in them; the birds of the air; every living creature that walk on the earth and all the creeping things that creep upon the earth. These are all general categories. After everything else is created, God says, “let us create MAN.” Us. Specifically. God loves us. Specifically. Second, we are much more than the rest of God's creation. We are part of God's creation, but we are much more than mere creatures. God breathed his very spirit into us. His breathe, from his mouth, he blew into our nostrils. I don't know if you've ever tried blowing into someone's nostrils, but if you're not intimately familiar with that person, it is extremely awkward. God specifically breathed HIS breath into us, his very spirit. We were created in the image of God, his spirit is a part of who we are. We are set apart from all the rest of creation. Special. Loved. In the beginning we were joined together by our spirits, our spirit in His and His spirit in ours. The two were... one. Sound familiar. In the beginning, God and Man were married, joined together by God himself. It was wonderful, but before too long, something went horribly wrong and the focus of God's love and affection began to thumb their noses at Him. They turned their back on him, chose to live life without him. We walked away from God. Even so, God continued to provide for us. He covered us in all the ways we needed covered. Gave us everything we needed. From the moment we left the Garden, God began the task of trying to win back our affections. God spent the entirety of human history attempting to get us to fall back in love with him. The entire Old testament is the story of God wooing his people back into his arms. But we continually turned our back on God, continually offended God, and continually rejected God. But, like a resolute and lovesick husband, he never gave up on his wayward wife. Then, in an act of perfect and desperate love, God himself came to live among us and give up his very life to bring us back into the perfect union we had in the Garden. Jesus, God become man, lived among us, modeled to us what the perfect union that we walked away from and were continually rejecting looked like, felt like, smelled like, sounded like. Then he crawled up on that cross and died in order to give us a perfect way back into his presence. The writer of Hebrews says in chapter twelve, verse two, that “for the joy set before him [Jesus] endured the cross”. What was that joy? It was us! What a perfect love! As Christ was being nailed to that cross, he was looking at me, at you, thinking to himself 'hang on, don't give up. I'm coming.” It was YOU that kept him on that cross, not your sin. It wasn't you sin that held him there, as a popular worship song states, it is God's furious, passionate, fiery love that held him there. Is there nothing that God won't do to see us back in his arms? God, the immortal eternal great I AM died in order that he may have us again. What did God get out the deal? He got YOU! What a glorious picture! What a perfect love! THIS is Good Friday!

So it's my prayer that we would step into this reality that's been prepared for us. God, will you take us by the heart and bring us back to you. Show us who you are, what you've done, and how much you love us. Give us a full and proper perspective of the cross so that we can see with absolute clarity what happened on the third day through the resurrection. God it's clearly evident by what you've done that you love us. Help us to come to a place of reciprocity where we can meet you in that love.