Chuck Colson: Death on a Friday afternoon
[Townhall.com]
April 21, 2012
Easter for many of us is a day of family gatherings and a celebration, not only of Christ’s resurrection, but also the coming of spring. In this week before Easter, though, let’s not rush the celebration before coming face-to-face with the paradoxes that are at the heart of the Christian faith.
Those paradoxes are the subject of a wonderful book Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus by my friend Father Richard John Neuhaus.
A paradox, as G. K. Chesterton famously put it, is Truth standing on her head to get attention. Our aversion and resistance to the truth is so strong that God often finds it necessary to employ extreme measures to get us to see past the lies we’ve embraced.
Never was this truer than on what Christians call Good Friday. As Neuhaus writes, If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything. That everything starts with telling the truth about the human condition. How? By paradoxically punishing the offended party, instead of the guilty.
As Neuhaus tells us, we are all aware that something has gone terribly wrong with the world, and with us in the world. It is not just history’s best-known list of horribles. It’s also the habits of compromise . . . loves betrayed . . . lies excused . . .
Yet, instead of acknowledging our complicity in the world’s evil, we minimize our own faults and regard our sins as small. Good Friday puts the lie to that claim. If the Son of God had to suffer such a horrible death, then our sins cannot have been small.
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