The Good in Good Friday

Just in case you've forgotten, the kid year revolves around holidays. Any first grader knows that each month has its own colors, sights, and sounds specific to one or more holidays, and their observance - which often mean a day off from school - not only is the way to mark the progression of the school year, but provides the reason for near-constant celebration.

September is Labor Day - not much of a holiday, but maybe a trip weekend, but it just gets better from there. October has Halloween; November, Thanksgiving; and December, the granddaddy of them all - Christmas. New Year's Day for a kid is actually December 26, the day we begin looking forward to Christmas again. February brings Valentine's Day - usually the occasion for some school party, March is St. Patrick's, and April brings Easter and Spring Break. May is relatively holiday-free, but by that time you're in the home stretch for summer, so who cares? And of course, somewhere in there falls a kid's birthday, the second holiest day behind Christmas. Summer is a holiday of its own.

The reason holidays are so attractive to kids is that they possess all of the elements that make kid life fun and memorable - bright colors, presents, special songs, hats or costumes, stories, and often, candy. Each is memorable and distinct because the observance makes it tangible.

So this Easter, my message to parents is this: Don't miss the boat on Good Friday.

Of all of my memories of church growing up, Good Friday would stand out as the most impactful day of the church year. Not Christmas - we were too pumped about what awaited us at home. And not Easter Sunday - that was really just church with a LOT of people there. But on Good Friday, the rawness and reality of the crucifixion was driven home.

For us, that meant Friday night church and a somber service where the last words of Jesus were explained. There was a giant wooden cross at the front of the church, and as each of the seven messages concluded, another set of lights was extinguished until only a spotlight remained on the cross. The last act was the raising of a giant black veil over the cross. Everyone was requested to leave the church in silence (for some reason I believed the pastors were bound by this until Sunday morning), and even though someone in our family would break this silence in the car on the way home, those 5-10 minutes of reflection left a huge impact on my 10-year-old brain. So much so, that 25 years later I can remember that the pastor concluded his final message in this way:

"Sunday we'll celebrate Jesus' resurrection, but tonight we don't look ahead. Tonight we're left where the disciples were on Good Friday - facing a dead Jesus. Not a sleeping Jesus...or a sick Jesus...but a dead Jesus." Powerful stuff.

Commercialism has no interest in Good Friday, and as a result, the symbols today still mean the same thing they meant then: the cross, the nails, the crown of thorns, the tomb. The death of Jesus is a reality that deserves to be faced, because it brings meaning to his sacrifice and also accentuates the miracle of the resurrection. The way we talk about the Easter event has become almost cliche: Jesus died on the cross and rose again. Ho hum. More accurately: Jesus was murdered, the disciples were anguished and scared and confused, and God supernaturally raised him from the dead in order to crown him as king. Good Friday brings us to the version of the story that ought to be told, because it captures the suspense and the drama and the heartache - the passion, if you will - of the death of Jesus.

Children are not too young to get this, but they won't get it if they're not exposed to it. You need not screen The Passion of the Christ in your living room; but simply constructing a wooden cross, letting kids touch and hammer nails into it, looking at depictions of the walk to Calvary, the raising of the crosses, the moment of Jesus' death - these lend a dose of reality to an old, old story. And if you think your kids are old enough, there are other movies less graphic than Passion that depict the crucifixion act.

Good Friday is good for Christians, and by that I mean not that it's meaningful, which of course it is, but that it has great utility. It recounts that at a particular, identifiable point in space-time history, the incarnate God, Jesus, was robbed of his life and that mankind, momentarily, lost its light. Easter completes the story, that Jesus didn't stay dead, and that hope was restored to the world. But on Friday, we rest in the place of sorrow that was very real. That's ok.

Maybe the reason kids love holidays so much is that they attach deep meaning to what are otherwise ordinary days. They give kids a sense of history. They cause us to sit up and take notice. Good Friday helps kids experience the reality of death in a way that causes them to fully appreciate the significance of hope.