What Happens On Good Friday

[Jesus watching me flail.]

I’ve got a bunch of blog posts half written, shoved in the back of my mind, jumbled against a list of things to do thirty miles long. I am feeling the pinch of time and the total absence of eternity. The minutes slip by one by one and as they slip, so pile up the tasks necessary for the impending feast.

Like I should pop out to the store several times. And wash the big pot. And finish the laundry (ha). And vacuum all the rooms. And do a bunch of baking. And run to visit someone who deserves a visit if it’s the only thing I do this week. And dye eggs or something. When really what I feel like doing is lying on the couch and eating chocolates, as Jesus did in the week of his passion–no wait, that’s not how it goes.

Whenever there’s a time to meditate on the work and person of Jesus, whatever day or week it might be, I like to clutter it up with the contradictory desires of lying back and doing nothing, and the deeply held belief that only a bunch of cleaning and cooking and busyness that will be the thing that makes it better. That’s what a feast means. Work! My work. And secondarily, the work of Jesus himself.

I mean, is the work of Jesus sufficient? When he went up to Golgatha and hung there and proclaimed, “It is finished,” did anybody really believe him? Has the church ever believed him? Don’t we always want to rush around and add things, give ourselves more to do so that whatever that finished work was will feel more complete?

It seems to me that we Christians, and I am the chief offender, are always saying, “We need to,” and “We should,” and then completing the sentence with activities like inventing a new method of evangelism, or planning some kind of event, or creating some kind of new way of thinking that will get us over the hump of never being able to finish anything.

There’s such a great wide chasm between the futility of my work, my striving, my to do list, and the finished work of Jesus at the cross. It’s a great gulf that I am always casting gossamer threads over, trying to drag myself across. “Work is good,” I say to myself, “it came before the fall.” I don’t want to face the fact that the fall made it into a chasing after the wind, that embedded into the very ground itself is an insurpassable contrast between what I can do and what God can do.

I like to sit in my pew on Good Friday and stare at the black shrouded cross and feel disappointed. Just once I wish God would let me achieve something on my own, without any help from him ot anyone. Like Nebuchadnezzar I would like to announce my godlike sufficiency to the internet.

But I can’t, because there hangs Jesus. Or rather, the cross we have is empty. It’s just plain wood. He didn’t have to go on hanging there, because, in a few short hours, he finished an eternity of work.

You know what, maybe I will have just one chocolate.