Good Friday commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. As a child, I had difficulty understanding what was supposed to be ‘good’ about the execution of a man that was supposed to have been God’s gift to mankind. I later learned that the ‘Good’ might just be a bad translation and it should be God’s Friday. But, that is not really important. The goodness of Jesus’s execution comes from the belief that:
God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.- (John 3:16)
I always found this belief to be a stumbling block. I never had any desire for eternal life. I never could understand how I would spend my time. For me, eternity is best measured in the doctor’s waiting room. Talk of personal salvation had no resonance for me. But other parts of Jesus’s message did resonate with me. For example, Jesus said:
“When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you” (Matthew 6:5-6).
I used to think about those words when I was sitting in church in my uncomfortable clothes. Why were we all praying together in public like “pretenders”?
Jesus railed against hypocrites. He shouted down those that made a great deal of the forms of religion without internalizing the message of religion…which is compassion and humility.
Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 14:11)
“Beware of the scribes, who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers. They will receive a very severe condemnation.”- (Mark 12:38-40)
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
It was this dual message that spoke to me. We should look after the poor, the afflicted, those that have taken the wrong path in life. And we should beware of ostentatiously religious people that do not back up their show of faith with any generosity or compassion.
So, on Good Friday I prefer not to dwell on the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. I prefer to think of his message to the living.
“God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”- (Matthew 22:32)
And I’ll leave you with a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. I don’t think Jesus would have disagreed.
2. The intellectual conscience
I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every
time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority
of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed
to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in
the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks
at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this
good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights
are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts.
I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible
to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given
themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and
without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted
men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what
is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these
virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does
not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest
distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and
was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their
bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia
discors [Discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19.]
and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without
questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such
questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even
finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible,and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps
persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is
human. This is my sense of injustice.
Regardless of your personal beliefs, I wish you a happy holiday and hope you have time to spend with your loved ones.