On Good Friday

[image error]We didn’t attend church much when I was growing up. If we did go, it was usually because there was a funeral or a wedding. I once asked my parents whether we were Protestants, and they just laughed. “I suppose we are Protestant” my dad said. “That is, if what you mean by that is a protest-ant.” When I asked for clarification he said, “It just means we’re not Catholic.” The answer wasn’t much help to me.

My father was a lapsed Roman Catholic. He had grown up in the church and attended a parochial school. He boasted that the nuns had expelled him from kindergarten for bad behavior. He had once snapped another boy’s bow tie, an apparently unpardonable sin in those days. My grandfather was a medical doctor who treated the priests and nuns of the parish and my father had seen its darker side. When my father talked about his religious upbringing, he talked mostly of guilt, hypocrisy, and spite. 

My mother, on the other hand, did not have much to say about her religious background, though I gathered she had occasionally attended church as a child. On one occasion she disparaged the Hallelujah chorus. “I hate that song” she complained. “When I was a child we had to stand through the whole thing, while they sang the same words over and over again.” My mother had a kind of spiritual sensibility but I do not think she would have called herself a Christian. Neither of my parents identified themselves this way. If Jesus’ name was mentioned at all in our home, it was usually as an expletive.

Yet for some reason, when Good Friday came, my mother insisted that my brother and sister and I stay indoors during the hours between 12 and 3 pm. When we demanded an explanation, she told us it was because those were the hours when Jesus hung on the cross. In the 1960’s it wasn’t unusual for people to observe Good Friday as a matter of course. Shops closed for those three hours and many churches held services. What was unusual was for my family to take note of this Christian observance. We did celebrate Christmas and Easter of course, but not in any especially religious way. Christmas was mostly about the presents. Easter was mainly about candy and a new set of clothes.

I was disturbed by this sudden burst of devotion. The thought of Jesus suffering for three hours seemed vaguely depressing to me. Why did He need to suffer? Moreover, why did the rest of us need to suffer with Him? Surely He wouldn’t care if I went out to play. Or was it that He resented my freedom, fixed as He was to His place of suffering during those three hours each year?

When I was older and my mother gave up on this forced observance, I realized that it had only been a concession to culture.  My mother did not want us to seem disrespectful. She did not want us to stand out. It would be several more years before I grasped the real significance of the cross. That understanding did not come from Good Friday but from the Scriptures. As I read the Gospels, I came upon the cross again and saw it in a different light.

This was not the morbid Christ of my youthful reflection. This Christ did not resent my freedom, He pitied my bondage to sin. His gaze was not one of reproach nor did He view me with spite. This was a Christ who gave Himself on my behalf. This was the Christ who prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Truer words were never spoken. On Good Friday, we did not know what we were doing.