Progressive Christian Social Action
Good Friday Guest Post by Mark Davies, see the original at One World House:
| In our desire to leap past Good Friday to Easter, we tend to forget that Jesus was a human person. He felt pleasure and pain. He had hopes and fears. He had moments of laughter, and he wept. He had friends and family whom he loved deeply. When he died, he had so much to live for.
Yet Jesus could not keep from speaking out for love. He could not keep from turning over the tables of corruption and injustice. He could not keep from calling out hypocrisy and greed. He could not keep from spending time with persons with whom “respectable” religious leaders were not supposed to be around. He could not keep from proclaiming good news for the poor and oppressed, and good news for the poor and oppressed was not seen as good ness by the wealthy and the oppressors. He could not keep from challenging the power of the empire with a different kind of power, and for this, the empire brutally and publicly murdered him. Whatever one thinks about what happened to Jesus on the Sunday after Good Friday, may we never lose sight of the person Jesus was – a person who lived and loved so fully that he could not give up on turning over tables for the most vulnerable in his community. May we never lost sight of what led him to the cross – the corrupt power of a colonial empire threatened by the radical Beloved Community of justice that Jesus called for with his life. If we focus too much on the resurrection and lose sight of Jesus as a person who lived, laughed, cried, hoped, feared, loved, suffered, and died; then we run the risk of missing what the radical vision of Jesus can bring to this life by focusing too much on the next. Jesus reminds us that we are to love, be present with, and seek justice for the poor, the sick, the hungry and thirsty, the naked, the homeless, the prisoners, the outcasts, the vulnerable, and the oppressed in this life. Empires like for their people to focus on the afterlife as a way to maintain control over them in this life. Jesus lived and loved for so much more than what life will be after we die. He did not simply live to be a human sacrifice for our sins. When the empire murdered Jesus they thought they had controlled him. They thought they had killed the movement of love and justice he created, but Jesus would not be controlled. The Empire, however, never stops trying to control those who follow this way of radical love and justice in this world…. On this Good Friday, may we live and love in resolve that like Jesus, we will not be controlled. To receive an email notification each time Sharon posts to her blog, click the “Follow Sharon Delgado” button at the right. |
Sharon Delgado 