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Thursday night was last night when I started writing this, but then stopped because I didn’t feel comfortable or qualified to write about religious topics. Besides, any guy who calls himself Sammy Sportface has got to be irreligious, right?
But I tried again this morning. However informed, whatever insecurities I feel, I must persist because this topic is too important to set aside. Last night wasn’t just another Thursday night. It’s the night my Mom and Dad and brothers, and sisters used to go to Church year after year as a family and listen to the Stations of the Cross, the story of Christ being jeered and destroyed by the people. It was a long service and a very heavy story to take in. Well over an hour we endured; it felt like two or more now that I think about. What an endless night was Holy Thursday.
It got heavier and deeper and more incomprehensible the next day. Wrap your head around that. The next day was Good Friday. That evening, all of us back in the church pews again lined up like an obedient basketball team ready for a big game (put me in, coach). It was the biggest of games, in all honesty, apparent anyway, as we were told.
During the Good Friday service, it got quiet in that church. Something cataclysmic and beyond human graspability had gone down. We were there to recognize the night when Christ was forced to carry a heavy cross up a hill with a bunch of thorns gashing into his head, which had to be, if this whole story is true, the original and ultimate blood, sweat, and tears situation.
But I never quite understood what they called this disastrous situation “good.” It wasn’t a good Friday in this man-getting-murdered-in-public sense. On the surface, anyway, it struck me as a bad Friday in every sense because once he got to the top of the hill, worn out and humiliated, ridiculed, spit on, mocked, told he was a hypocrite and fake, they hung him hung on a wooden cross drilling nails through each of his two hands and two feet. That must have hurt a lot.
People watched this man get murdered, and they all celebrated. How evil were they? You don’t see that every day and may never in your life. It makes me think of the terrorists beheading people as if they’re carving pumpkins. Ruthless assholes. Hell is where they should be now. Celebrating another person’s pain, or not caring as you watch them suffer, is what sociopaths do, and we all know we don’t need or want any of them around ever.
Good Friday was a bad Friday. Human suffering. Blood, agony, humans treating another human with cruelty. Literally they tortured and killed the man.
Who was that man?
Historical documents report that man’s name was Jesus. As the story goes, this bad Friday was actually good all lined up with God the Father’s grand plan to have his son be born as a human, live for 33 years, tell people he’s the Son of God, work miracles, then die to cleanse us for all of our sins so we could be free to go to Heaven and be with God the Father and his son and enjoy everlasting glory forever.
He sent his Son to die for us.
And that’s what happened.
On Good Friday, which is today.
Is all of this really true? Did it really happen?
The question we all want to know the answer to but never get.
I once attended a men’s Bible study group and they had us read a book called More Than a Carpenter. The book is memorable because the author had the belief before writing it that the story of Jesus as told in the Bible was not true. He embarked on research to disprove this once and for all.
Tried he did – mightily. As is human nature, he wanted to be right. He wanted his belief to be confirmed that the whole story about the life and death of Jesus as conveyed in the Bible was made up. After laborious hours attempting to disprove all of it once and for all, he admitted he could not find any credible evidence that it was not true. So, by implication, the story as conveyed in the Bible is true. This is what he concluded.
This was one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had in thinking through this entire story because the author set out to discredit the entire narrative and yet admitted he could not.
Then again, maybe that author wrote the book just to sell them and make money and wasn’t honest about any of it. Concoct a counter-intuitive story about whether God exists and fatten your bank account.
I don’t know if God exists or Good Friday or Holy Thursday are based on historical facts. Probably won’t until the moment I die at the earliest. It seems far-fetched, doesn’t it, that some all knowing God the Father would somehow impregnate a woman named Mary in some way other than the way we know that to happen, and she would give birth to a son named Jesus and he would tell people he was the Son of God – the real honest to goodness God.
Who would be so daring and brash to make such a claim if it were not true? Who would make up such a story? Well, humans make up stories every day and have for thousands of years so there’s that. I make up stories nearly every day.
How is it that – and I really want the answer to this – here we are more than two thousand years later than this man supposedly lived and we’re still grappling with whether this person existed and died for us? Or are we believing a fairytale completely made up that never happened? If it is made up, it’s the greatest works of fictitious storytelling in the history of storytelling. Wow – what a tale we have been told. This is one whopper of a ruse.
If it isn’t made up – if the essence of the life of Jesus actually happened – isn’t that one incredible thing to think about, the ultimate way off unwieldy wonder, a seeming impossibility that was not only possible but did come true? Miraculous is the quintessential understatement to capture the essence of this – if true.
I am not sure about any of this. It seems possible but implausible. It’s what I hope happened because that seems to be good for all of us having the chance to go to Heaven and feel bliss for “eternity” whatever that means. But I realize that hope isn’t based in much of anything I can grasp with my hands. It’s out there, in the air, an abstraction. Like smoke and gravity and oxygen, it’s elusive and hard to describe. We can’t touch hope.
Do I believe? Do you believe? Should we believe? And if so, why should we believe? I honestly don’t know.
I think about all the suffering that we all endure during our lives as we watch our parents and friends and coworkers die, and we hear about planes crashing and killing all on board and that haunts us and we tell ourselves that maybe we shouldn’t get on a plane again because we don’t want to know what it feels like mentally to know our plane is doomed.
I think about people getting fired and becoming mentally ill – against their wills for sure because no one wants to be sick in the head. I think about not feeling hopeful about life. I think about people getting cancer and their bodies atrophying and then, eventually, taking their last breath. I think about their families watching this happen and not knowing what’s happening with their loved one as they leave us.
It’s the not knowing that seems to be the most sure of all these things.
When I think about these painful parts of living, I wonder why a God who supposedly cared so much about us that He sacrificed his Son to save us would allow us to experience so much pain and nervousness and despair and fear? Why do we have to endure so much? Why is life this way?
The short answer is I don’t know.
The long answer is I don’t know.
I hope when I die all this uncertainty gets erased and everything I have wondered about life, such as why we’re here and what happens when we die, gets answered and the answers make perfect sense. I honestly don’t know if that’s going to happen. I hope it does. But hope is not certainty. Hope is not perfection. Hope does not translate to answers to the ultimate questions about human existence.
Which makes me think about more than thirty years when on Good Friday the priest gave the most memorable homily of the hundred I’ve heard. Simple and repetitive, jolting and mind-expanding, raw and honest, it went something like this:
“Does anyone really know what it’s like to carry a heavy cross up a hill? Does anyone really know what it’s like to have thorns sliced into our skulls? Does anyone really know what it’s like to have people mocking us and spitting on us? Does anyone really know what it’s like to hang on a cross? Does anyone really know what it’s like to have our feet and hands nailed to a cross?
As I heard that I remember thinking to myself that, no, I don’t know what that would be like. I don’t think anyone else does either.
But I choose to believe it happened.
And am grateful that it did – if it did.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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