Good Friday Meditation
Good Friday Meditation
John 15:13; 19:16-18; Romans 5:6-11
Why did Good Friday have to happen? Did it just happen or was it inevitable—inevitable in a world of this kind? It was inevitable.
It was not an accidental, marginal type of happening; it grew out of the nature of the facts. It had to happen. For it is a law of life that where love meets sin in the loved one, at the junction of that sin and that love a cross of pain is set up. It is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sins and sorrows of the loved one and make them its own. If it does not do that, then it is not love. All love has the doom of bleeding upon it whenever the object of its love goes wrong. You may say that the guilty alone should bleed, and not the innocent—it is unjust. But, just or unjust, it is a fact.
If you would say to a mother whose son is breaking his own heart and hers by his waywardness: “Mother, it is unjust for you to suffer in this way. You are innocent; your son is guilty,” would that mother not say in reply: “Suffer for my son, unjust? It is the very thing that motherhood within me demands that I should do.” In the name of a legal justice would you deny that mother the privilege of being noble, of being a mother?
There is a justice higher than legal justice—a justice in which it is right for the strong, at cost to itself, to save the weak; it is right for the holy to save the unholy. This is the law of higher justice. If God is love, then, when that love meets sin in us, the loved ones, that love is bound to wear on its heart a cross of pain. It is inevitable. Good Friday is the outer cross telling us of the inner cross on the heart of God. There is a Christ painted in Germany during the famine days after World War I, and the Christ is famine-stricken too. That is authentic. Christ is hungry with the hungry. He is guilty in the sinful. He makes it his own. That is atonement.
In South America, I was given a stone which had a cross at its center; nature formed that cross there. The cross is at the heart of our relationships; it is built into things. It is “the ground plan of the universe.” Everywhere that love meets sin, love suffers. That is the meaning of the cross.
O Christ, I am bowed in the dust. If my sin is yours, then how can I sin again? I will not. O Galilean, you have conquered me. I cannot stand before this invading love. I bow forever at your feet. Amen.