What Really Happened on Good Friday?
What Really Happened on Good Friday?
Apparently, the masses including individuals who have never visited a church in their entire life are aware of the broad outlay of the Good Friday. Jesus was arrested, sent to trial, crucified and died. They have attended sermons, and songs, perhaps even seen The Passion of the Christ and spent some days putting it to the test.
However, there is the difference between understanding the outline and knowing what happened. Not only the physical events--to which, however, they are more important than most people think--but the theological earthquake which was shaking the ground on which that Friday was resting. The legal transaction. The cosmic confrontation. The split point of human history before and after.
It is when you really take your time and walk through Good Friday, hour by hour, layer upon layer, that it ceases being a religious experience and is something that impinges upon your real life with a weight heavier than lately.
The Preliminary Thursday Preparations: Night Before.
You cannot make sense of Good Friday without leaving Thursday night, because what happened in Gethsemane cannot be discussed outside of what happened in Golgotha.
The Last Supper was just over Jesus taking bread and wine, saying what his men should not really realize until sometime afterward, somewhere in an oasis in the Desert of Gethsemane, and thereafter he went to a garden in the Mount of Olives. And there he did a thing which, when you come to think of it homilies, is, upon the whole, one of the most wonderful things in all Scripture.
The cup upon which he was complaining was not physical ache, awful as it would have been. In an ordinary picture of the Old Testament the cup means judgement of deity - the entire bulk of the wrath of God formally upon sin. Jesus was looking into the future and inquiring with the deepest agony of humanity whether it was to be spared. And still resolving to read it.
It is something remarkable, because Luke 22:44 writes that his sweat dropped like the drops of blood. This hematidrosis is a known and documented condition in which extreme psychological stress may cause the rupture of the wall of capillaries in the perspiration glands causing the combination of sweat blood. This was not dramatical.
Arrest: Midnight in the Garden.
As Jesus continued his prayer, Judas came with a group of soldiers and religious leaders, in the dark, with flashing torches and weapons. Jesus was arrested after being declared by him and he kissed him.
This is a chronicle recorded in John 18:4-6 that is absent in the other Gospels. When the soldiers started the words, I am seeking Jesus of Nazareth, I am he, and according to the article, made them recede and fall on the ground.
Something minimal, which is not left out by John. The English translation of the Greek figure Jesus speaks is the same expression in the Greek translation of the book of Exodus in which God discloses his name to Moses. John wants his readers to know that the one who is being arrested had the power to halt what was being heard at any given time whether the soldiers comprehended what they were hearing or not. Circumstances did not victimize him. He was pursuing a selected route.
Peter took out the sword and cut the ear of the servant of the high priest, who hardly realized what was going on, yet that was the hour in which the bewildered, mad-cap love of the disciples was best expressed. Jesus touched the ear of the man who was being healed and commanded Peter to withdraw the sword and accompanied the soldiers. He was led away. The disciples scattered. They would do just as he had told them.
The Trials: A Juridical and Ethical Disaster.
Annas was the first person to interrogate Jesus (as mentioned in John 18:12-24). Annas was the former High Priest and was still a powerful figure due to his relationship with Caiaphas (the current High Priest).
The ecclesiastical tribunal was sitting in the middle of the night which, too, was contrary to their own ordinances, in which capital cases should be tried by daylight.
In the courtyard out of doors, meanwhile, Peter was heating himself at a fire. Three times did he happen to be recognized as a follower of Jesus. Three times he denied it. At the third refusal a rooster cawed,-- and in Luke 22:61 there is one of the saddest pieces of information in the whole Gospel: The Lord turned, and looked directly upon Peter.
Before Pilate (John 18:28-19:16). The Jewish leaders were unable to legally kill anyone who was under the control of the Romans, they had to pass through Pilate. So Jesus was taken to the Roman governor of Judea who at once saw that the accusations were political in nature.
Pilate made several attempts to set Jesus free. He sentenced him to innocence on several occasions. He had made the attempt of flogging him, in the hope that, without a sentence to death, a brutal treatment of him would quiet the populace. Even the flogging itself was intolerable to a great number of men.
The Via Dolorosa: The Walk of the Cross.
Once handed over by Pilate, Jesus was flogged once more again, or so we may say were the flogging which had already been administered, or so it was so told, and a crown of thorns thrust upon his head. The thorns of the species on which Jerusalem was most probably depended were long, straight, and such as had been made by the workmen who riveted the crown not merely to degrade but to infiltrate.
He was handed the crossbeam -the patibulum -to her execution. The complete cross would have been too cumbersome; and the erect post was already in position there. Yet, bearing all that his body had already gone through, he failed on the spot.
The way to Golgotha, the location of the skull, was likely not that extensive. But in state, in condition, after a sleepless night, half-dozen beatings, much flogging, and the mental burden of what was passing on, it was a journey that was practically unintelligible.
What Exactly Happened in the Crucifixion.
Rome developed crucifixion to be as humiliating as possible, as public as possible as well as as long as possible. It was the prerogative of the lowest people slaves, those who were insurrectionists, those who Rome wanted to make an example of. None of the Roman citizens could be crucified. Its openness was not accidental: this is what is done to whoever dares Roman law.
On Golgotha Jesus was served a wine with myrrh, a painkiller of low intensity, which some historians feel was given out of good sport by female Jews of Jerusalem. He refused it. He decided to play this out to the full.
His wrists had been driven through the wood with the nails,-- the Greek word hands, incorporates the wrist. Then his feet were nailed, over one another, or one on each side of the upright post. The cross was raised.
on was mostly by asphyxiation. To breathe, the victim needed to stretch the nails through the feet that were upward, and then straighten them to stretch the lungs. This implied that every breath took a straining, painful effort.
The Moment Everything Changed
Three events take place simultaneously in Matthew 27:51-53 as Matthew experiences his death. The temple's curtain, which separates the Most Holy Place where God dwells, from the rest of the temple and all of humanity, was ripped from top to bottom. Unlike a human who tears a curtain, it was torn top to bottom from the divine perspective.
The earth shook. Rocks split. And in the most inexplicable of the entire narration of the crucifixion-tombs broke and some of the dead rose.
The centurion who had been in charge of the execution glanced at all this, and said: This is certainly the Son of God. (Matthew 27:54) A man whose position in the Roman world did not raise him a hopeful religious point-blank shot, who in the ranks had seen many a murder done, looked into all of this and came to a conclusion not to be arrived at by the religious establishment of the day.
It is the theological foamboil of the entire day tearing off of the curtain. During centuries, entry into the presence of God had been mediated by priests, by sacrifice, by the elaborate ritual. The veil separated the greater part of mankind with the most sacred spot.
What Good About Good Friday.
The name does not sound right at all. What is good about the day when the most innocent person that ever existed was scaled up and executed? Which side does that qualify as good?
Good Friday derives its name from the Old English word that brought the meaning of the word holly, i.e. it could be better translated as Holy Friday. But there is something good there that is, to say, decently. Since what had happened on that Friday was good in the most acute sense of this term. Not pleasant. Not painless. Not what anyone would have preferred to have were it only the aim to escape suffering. But good — as in genuinely, cosmically, redemptively good.
The apostle Paul simply states it in 2 Corinthians 5: 21: God made him who had no sin sinner, that in him we should be the righteousness of God. The best dramatic transaction in history was the exchange which occurred on Good Friday. The one who was not meriting any condemnation was the giver of the condemnation that was the portion of all those who merited it. And opened the door to a righteousness, a right in the sight of God, that man could never gain by any efforts.
By any fair reckoning, extraordinary good, that. Everyone who has ever checked his or her life and realized that it was not what it was supposed to be. Anyone with the weight can't rid their shoulders. To any one who has ever had the problem of wondering whether, perhaps there was ever a possibility of the distances between himself and God being even remotely comparable.
Q: What was the need of Jesus to die? Did God not know how to forgive sin without a death?
Here is one of the most profound in Christian theology and has been wrestled over earnestly during two thousand years. The brief answer is that forgiveness is never without a price, it costs somebody something. Forgiving someone who offended you in a real way means that you take the burden of their action instead of causing them to ransom it.
Q. What is the real meaning of It is finished?
There are a few important ways in which the tetelestai of the Greek world was used in the ancient world. When a debt was paid up in totality it was written on receipts. It was applied to a task or assignment that had been accomplished. By saying this Jesus did not mean to say he was defeated, he meant to say complete.
Q: What was the reason why the temple curtain was torn up?
It consisted of a curtain, nearly sixty feet high, and several inches thick, which separated the Most Holy Place in the temple with others of the building. It was the concrete representation of a barrier separating a God who is holy and sinners who are the emissaries of sinful human nature.
Q: What must we as Christians do during Good Friday?
Good Friday is no celebratory day at all, but instead one of sincere consideration as to the seriousness of the task accomplished by Christ and the reasons why it had to be done. Gathering in a Good Friday service, being quiet and reading Scripture, fasting, reading the accounts of the crucifixion slowly, or just sitting at the cross and not hurrying to the resurrection are all good methods of celebrating the day.
Conclusion
Good Friday is not all about suffering. It is concerning the accomplishment of suffering. It is the day when a Roman execution became the turning point of human history. The day when the unfairest judgment of all times was decided upon, was, in some way, the most rightful deed of all time. The day the curtain tore and the door opened. On the day when a man expired and, in expiring, told us that all that had to be done was done. You do not need to know all the theology to know the burden of it. All that you need to do is to get back, and see what has really happened It is not the airbrushed, stained glass version of it, but the actual one. There was the garden, the sufferings, the nails, the darkness, the scream of desertion and then the word, so still and perfect, so conclusive that followed. And then to understand that all of it every agonizing moment of it was for the specific purpose of making a way for you.
Written By Hirwa Karake Bertrand
