Good Friday Faith

As important as Easter faith.

I said PV would return after Easter, but given the clarification I enjoyed during Lent, Good Friday is actually a more appropriate day to return to writing.

For one, I continue to be taken with the hard edges of faith and the inexplicable behavior of God.  Faithful readers may not be surprised by this, but I find myself surprised that this theme keeps hanging around in my heart and mind, decade after decade.  

Part of that is due to my natural contrarian nature. I’m embedded in a religious culture that is engineered primarily to help us feel good about God and proselytizes the psychological benefits of faith.  Joel Osteen’s popular book Your Best Life Now may be an extreme example, a prosperity gospel treatise of the first order, but it catches the spirit of Christianity as practiced in large swaths of North America. And I push back against the notion that faith is supposed to help mitigate or forget the tragedy of life and the absence of God.  Partly because that has not been my experience, and partly because it doesn’t seem true to Scripture. 

Then again, as thin as pop-faith is, there’s something fundamentally true there.  Jesus didn’t just die on a cross; he also rose from the grave.  Hope is not a mirage. 

And then there is simple psychology.  One can literally go mad spending too much time pondering the innumerable sufferings and injustices of life and God’s seeming silence.  It’s too much for a human being to bear, so we need something to distract us.  Thus the raging popularity and robust financial health of the entertainment industry—movies, music, TV series, sports—and wonderful time wasters like TikTok, Instagram, gossip, hobbies, workaholism, careerism, family.  And (if I may speak autobiographically) religion.  

In our better moments, we recognize how we use most of these activities as a “denial of death” (as the title of Ernest Becker’s best seller from the 1970s put it), to distract us from the meaningless and/or horrific aspects of life.  We also know that to keep one’s sanity, these are the sorts of activities one must make a part of one’s life.  For me it’s Instagram, hobbies (painting, writing!), workaholism (handyman endeavors), TV series (rewatching Breaking Bad as we speak).  

And religion, as I said (more of that in the future.  But that doesn’t work for me as well as it used to.  That is, lately as I read Scripture and listen to sermons and read spiritual books, I’m bombarded with disturbing questions and only a small dose of comfort.  

For example, I recently heard a sermon about handling suffering. The point was (1) that God empathizes with our suffering, and (2) he will rescue us from our suffering. But of course, many if not most people who are suffering do not feel that God is even around—thus the universal “my God, why have you forsaken me” experience.  And then there are the number of incidents—too many to count—where God did not rescue (Holocaust victims, slaves, death from disease, and so on). 

Death is, in fact, a rescue from present sufferings, but this isn’t usually what is meant when we think of God’s rescue operations.  These are not the testimonies we tell when trying to give God credit: “My wife had cancer, but thank God she died.” 

Anyway, these are the types of things I think of these days when I read or hear about God’s empathy and promise of rescue. Perhaps perverse, but that’s me, for better or worse. 

To repeat: I fully affirm God’s love for us and that he does indeed rescue us in and from this travail of tears.  I just think we need to be more honest with how he does that, in Scripture and in our lives.  Good Friday is good not merely because it recalls our redemption but because it signals how that redemption manifests itself in our daily lives—usually through a cross. 

After reading an initial draft of this piece, a friend, Nancy L., wrote, “As I read, I kept thinking, ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’… knowing that we are always and forever walking through that valley.”  Indeed.  

One example of how I try to fill out the messages that usually come our way: I passed a church sign this week that said, “He’s not on the cross. He is risen!”  To wit: his suffering is past; he lives in perpetual bliss.  But could it be that Jesus is still on the cross and that he is also risen?  Is Christian faith about transcending suffering or is it about weaving it, along with hope, into the meaning of our lives?  Could it be that suffering is, for the time being anyway, the meaning of this life?  And that resurrection hope is not something that mitigates suffering but helps us grasp its meaning—and thus gives us a fuller, deeper grasp of hope? 

 So as I take up the metaphorical pen again, I’ll continue to poke my nose into this sort of thing—what might be called God’s hard mercy.  One difference going forward: I do not promise a weekly offering.  One thing I have been reminded about the last few weeks: I’m not capable of producing thoughtful commentary every week. That will come as no surprise to many of you!  But I’m relieving myself of the mantra, “Excellence on demand!” I’ll let the Holy Muse come as he may.  I’ll be surprised, however, if I don’t offer something at least a couple of times a month. 

I still deeply value the financial support many of you have given me. It makes possible this newsletter and the efforts and research that undergird it.  Though older now, I am still an arrogant young man at heart(!), believing that my writing is a useful contribution to understanding the spiritual journey we’re all on.   Thus I will continue to make the newsletter free to all but continue to welcome more patrons who want to support my writing and make it available to a larger readership.   

Jordan Peterson on Catholicism

And I will continue to offer links that help us better grasp the challenges we face. To show that I’m an equal opportunity offender, I offer this video.  Peterson, as usual, makes bold and sweeping statements that deserve to be nuanced.  Contrary to his assessment, there are, for example, a lot of tough-minded bishops, priests, and laity in the Catholic church—go watch the new movie Cabrini for an example.  I also don’t think that he completely grasps what Pope Francis is about.  But his basic insight about the current state of the Catholic church (which applies in large part to the Protestant church, of course), is more right than wrong IMHO. 

Grace and peace,

Mark

Photo credit: Stephanie Frey/iStock