Too Nice for Black Friday

It's Good Friday but it's too nice a day. Good Friday was "black Friday" before it was "good." As a child I asked the question anyone ought to ask unless they get too religious too quick: What's good about Good Friday? I mean he gets betrayed, denied, beat up, and hung out to dry on a tree of death. Did Pilate wash his hands in that bowl and say to a bloody Jesus, "Well, have a GOOD day" just before he sent him off to that barren hill to be crucified?

So I'm driving up in the church parking lot with the top down on my car. The pink petals are falling off the cherry trees like a spring-time snow shower. The tulips are starting to break open at the front door of the church. All is "good" with the world....and then I think...in a few hours the sanctuary lights will be dimmed...the story will be read...and the Christ candle will be taken from the room to remind all who gather than the "light of the world" is "gone out."

It's too pretty a day for such a story. I came in and told Linda, our church receptionist, "to cancel Good Friday services...It's too nice a day to kill Jesus." She looked at me like she's looked at me before when I say strange things. "I'm serious," I said. "It should be cloudy with rain dripping from the cross atop the church roof."

But then that is what makes Good Friday, good. It is a day for all our days. He is after all "fairest Lord Jesus...ruler of all nature...a nature that is "robed in the blooming garb of spring." But then he is also the one whose sacred head is wounded,"with grief and shame weighed down."

It is good because what we have today in this sudden spring with pollen ready to break out is an advertisement for Easter. But before we get to the beauty of the sunrise of resurrection no matter how pretty a day it is we have to stop....stop at the cross and remember how much this God of ours loves us on good days and bad days.

So who knows, it might be pouring down rain on Easter morning when we long for it to be a pretty day. Now, its a pretty day on "black Friday" but that is "good" because no matter what the atmospheric conditions are the cosmic weather person says on the other side of the dark clouds that surround a cross, "the sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun...just thinking about tomorrow wipes away the cobwebs and the sorrow till there's none..."

Yea, I know, it's not so religious and it's not a hymn but it is why this is Good Friday....no matter what the weather....good or bad...it's good.
jody