On Faith Forum
April 22, 2011
Why we need Good Friday more than ever
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
“What people don’t realize is how much religion costs,” Flannery O’Connor once wrote. “They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”
O’Connor knew something about the cross. The acclaimed novelist and devout Christian lost her father to Lupus when she was 15, then battled the painful, debilitating disease herself for 14 years until it finally killed her at age 39. Along the way, O’Connor made sense of her suffering by viewing it in light of the sufferings of Christ. Her Catholic faith taught her that while God does not will human suffering, it is an inescapable part of life in our fallen world. And through his sacrifice on the cross, Jesus transformed human suffering from an unmitigated evil to a means of grace, a way his followers can imitate him and participate, in some small way, in his redemptive work.
The mystery of redemptive suffering that O’Connor embraced in her own life is the same one that the world’s 2 billion Christians commemorate on Good Friday. It is the mystery that Jesus alluded to in the Gospels when he told his disciples that “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38) and explained his coming trials, and those of his followers, by reminding them that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)
Deep as the biblical roots of redemptive suffering run, this concept – along with Good Friday observance itself – has fallen out of fashion in many corners of our culture. Far more popular are the messages of megastar prosperity preachers who tout the Bible as a combination diet manual and get-rich-quick-guide and faith as an escape from suffering. More than two-thirds of Americans identify as Christian, yet the sense that suffering makes no sense, and that the point of life is to avoid it at all costs, is quietly accepted among many of us. Our despair of finding meaning in suffering goes a long way toward explaining everything from our increasing support for assisted suicide and euthanasia of the sick and elderly to our rising demand for genetic counseling and “designer babies” and our astronomically high abortion rates for infants with a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis.
Our collective aversion to imperfection, pain and sacrifice is not new, of course, any more than is our collective preference for Easter Sunday over Good Friday. It was the same in Jesus’ day. Peter greets Christ’s predictions of his passion with incredulity: “No such thing shall ever happen to you” (Matthew 16:22). James and John respond by demanding dibs on heaven’s best seats: “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left” (Mark 10:37). “How long will I endure you?” Jesus exclaims at one point, frustrated by his followers’ cluelessness.
Then, after his death, something happens. They get it. Not right away and not all at once, but they get it. Filled with the Holy Spirit and commissioned by the risen Christ to spread his good news to the ends of the earth, they do just that, embracing their own daunting trials along the way. Even Peter, who first shrank from suffering, winds up heroically fulfilling Jesus’ prophecy that “when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone will lead you where you do not want to go. … Follow me.” (John 21: 18 – 19)
Christians believe that with God’s grace, we can get it, too. Not right away and not all at once, but we can get it. We can discover the redemptive power and eternal significance even in our fiercest trials if we remember that there is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday, and there is no resurrection without the cross.
As O’Connor put it, “Evil is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured.” Good Friday is a reminder that we do not endure that mystery alone. We do so in the intimate company of a God who tasted all of life’s bitterness so we could taste eternal joy.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is author of “The New Faithful,” an ex-presidential speechwriter, op-ed columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and host of “Faith & Culture,” a TV and radio show on EWTN.