Good Friday

The prophet Isaiah predicted that one day God would send someone who would be rejected by Israel’s leadership, condemned by his fellow citizens, and abandoned by his closest followers. That person was Jesus. Isaiah, thinking of Israel’s many sins and failures, says that Jesus was “…pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5-6).

I want you to reflect on that…and the utter abandonment that Jesus experienced. “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.”

Every time we sin, we should be mindful that it is precisely for that that he gave his very life, through suffering the most horrific and painful of deaths imaginable. Yet we shouldn’t stop sinning out of guilt, shame, or compulsion. No. More rather, we should stop sinning in response to God’s love that is beyond measure and because we love him knowing that Jesus is our friend, our brother, our Lord, Saviour, and Redeemer, mindful that “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). We should always seek to act out of and in response to love, and never out of guilt or compulsion. Please know that Jesus wants to be your friend, loves you beyond measure, and invites you to walk with him.

Like a good king and leader, and like an incredible friend, faithful and true – Jesus “took the fall”. He stood in the gap and took upon himself our iniquity. He was pierced, crushed, punished, and sacrificed for the sins, failures, and cruelties of us all. Think about the enormity of that…Jesus took upon himself the sin of the whole world, once and for all – for all times – past, present and future. And since Jesus was willing to be that sacrifice, the only sacrifice that could accomplish that, there is no longer a curtain between the guilty and God’s mercy. Nothing blocks access to God’s presence for anyone anymore. Good Friday is good news because Jesus’ death announces that there is forgiveness for all sins. His blood pulls back the curtain of God’s mercy and now through repentance and in God’s grace, all people can be forgiven and saved from a death that would otherwise be deserved.

This Easter, as you reflect on Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and later his exaltation, and perhaps think about your own life, when your time is upon you, how would people know you’ve lived a life worth living? If you’ve exercised a leadership role, how would people know you’ve been a good leader? If you are a friend, how would your friends know that you love them?

As a leader, the answer will be because it was never about you, it was always about Jesus; and in all things, you strived to give God the glory. As a leader, other people will pick up where you left off and continue without you, that you were clear enough, your cause was compelling enough, and the tools that you left were sharp enough that others figured out how to not only use them but to make them better and reinvent new ones. Do you know that? Do you realise the wisdom in that?

As a friend, the answer will be that you were constant and true, faithful, resolute, and full of integrity even in and through adversity. If you are a friend, you don’t abandon your friends. As a friend, you truly yearned for your friends to be blessed, and that you endeavoured to inspire them to be great and to be the best versions of themselves possible. As a friend, you did all that you could to encourage others and lead them to the foot of the cross and the seat of mercy. As a friend, you brought consolation even in times of desolation.

At the end of the day, we will have lived a life worth living if we can look back and say our efforts were never in vain, and that we had the strength and the conviction to complete the tasks entrusted to us by God. And in all of this knowing that we have done right with our time on this earth, that we fought the good fight, we finished the race, we kept the faith. So, I pray that on this Good Friday, you would understand and accept the enormity of what Jesus accomplished through his death on the cross and how he died in your place having lived a life worth living. I pray that you might be a friend of Jesus, as he is a friend to you. Only through him will we have access to God’s mercy and only by his blood do we escape the death we deserve. We have the privilege of being invited to follow him and embrace him as the way, the truth and the life. Amen