Opposite Day

This is my Good Friday post as part of my #Because of Him Series.

4. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." -- John 15:13
Because of Him, we can hope for things we cannot see.

"But why is it called Good Friday if something bad happened?" my son asked me today. It's the same question we've probably all had.

It's a day of paradox, a day of contradiction. Jesus died, which was bad. But He needed to die, so it was good. Bad men crucified Him, so they were following Satan. And yet God used the actions of the bad men to bring about the Atonement and Resurrection. It's all confusing.

And then there's this matter of resurrection. If you grow up believing it, it's no problem at all to accept that after we die, we can be resurrected. But imagine trying to convince a scientist of it.

"But," they might say, "how can a body become immortal? How can you overcome the second law of thermodynamics? What justification do you have for believing something so completely opposite of what we have observed about bodies since the dawn of time?"

For that matter, what justification do we have for believing anything Christ taught? He said "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it" (Luke 9:24). But that's not what we experience here and now. We see time and time again that might makes right. We see evidence daily that money and power can get us anything the world can offer. We see that putting ourselves first ensures our own successes. And life is short, so we might as well get what we can while we can.

. . . But that bleak view of the world is not the only view. We see that bullying often wins, but so does altruism. We see that putting power in the hands of the underprivileged -- such as giving education to mothers -- benefits the whole society. We see that when we care about others' needs, we can come up with remarkable innovations that bless many lives. When love defines our motives, we begin to see glimpses of the kingdom of God.

So yes, maybe the laws of physics and entropy and scarcity are accurate, but perhaps they are incomplete. Perhaps they work best in a world focused on oneself rather than on others. Maybe a world turned upside down, where the last shall be first and the first shall be list, is the realer world after all.

And if we can see that Christ's instructions for the kingdom of God create the reality we prefer to the nasty, brutish, and short life created by the fall of Adam, perhaps it's not so foolish to believe His promise that the kingdom of God could contain something as incredible and expansive as resurrection, as heaven, as a loving and powerful God. Perhaps, as C. S. Lewis said in The Great Divorce,

All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste'

'It seems big enough when you're in it, Sir.'

'And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific is only a molecule'

Good Friday was terrible. It was confusing. It was devastating. But the senseless death of a carpenter from Galilee meant so much more than any of them could imagine. Good Friday was bad, but it was  just the tiny atom of Hell that seemed so formidable until Christ confronted it personally and proved it had no power against the hugeness and goodness of God.

And if Christ can transform a bad Friday into Good Friday, then we have so much reason to hope in all of His promises.