Why Is It "Good" Friday?
A
few years ago, I watched a television commentator, probably purely
in the interests of affability, extend hopes that his audience would have and
enjoy ”a happy Good Friday,” a wish equivalent to hoping Jews would have a fun
Holocaust observation or that Ukrainians enjoy reflecting on Russia’s seizure of
Crimea.
Good Friday is only “good” considering what happened over two
thousand years ago on Calvary or Golgotha, the site where Jesus
Christ was crucified and in the context of what Christians believe happened
three days later on what is now called Easter Sunday when He was resurrected
from the dead.
As a child, I was always bewildered as to why the Son of God endured
the ignominy of public humiliation and torture and why He allowed Himself to be
strapped to a cross like a common criminal and permitted Roman soldiers to pound
spikes into His hands and feet when He could have simply vaporized His captors
at will and zapped Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas into fiery oblivion.
Later, as a rebellious, Catholic adolescent, I was equally befuddled
by restrictions on what I could and not do on Good Friday such as attending
church services and suffering through the onerous burden of being silent between
the hours of 12 and 3 PM, the time generally considered the period
following Christ’s condemnation and scourging when He hung, nailed on a
cross.
Today, in my dotage, . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=36706.)
Anti-Easterites
Atheistic liberal-leftists have been warring on religion, God,
Christianity, and Christmas for decades and, having succeeded in large part in
banning God from public discourse, in mocking Christianity, and in desecrating
Christmas, they’ve lately been focusing on attacking Easter.
Christians celebrate Easter Sunday as the central feast of
Christianity, the day of the resurrection of Jesus Christ which in Western
Christianity marks the end of Lent, a 40-day period of fasting and penance in
preparation for Easter. Eggs, bonnets, parades, and bunnies long ago supplanted
the true significance of the Easter observance but the atheists are hardly
finished with their efforts to destroy Christian traditions.
As with most radicals, lib-leftists know to start with small fires in
anticipation of igniting greater sociological conflagrations in the future.
Thus, to cite just two of many absurdities, the little town of
Munson, Ohio was forced by agitators to scrap its “Easter Egg Hunt” in favor of
a more politically correct “Spring Egg Hunt” and a sophomore in Seattle was
forbidden to call little plastic eggs filled with jellybeans she wanted to
present to third graders “Easter eggs” unless she re-named them “spring
spheres.”
However, the concerted attack on Easter isn’t simply a name-game and
the forces of atheistic negativism are now taking their war down to whole, new
levels.
On Wednesday, while insisting he was not comparing Barack Hussein
Obama to Jesus Christ, the reliably ridiculous Reverend Al Sharpton did just
that on the “Tom Joyner Morning Show.”
Sharpton, who has been aptly described as ”a racial arsonist”, oddly
related President Obama to the meaning of Easter by saying, “I think that the
message is, no matter what the world may do to unfairly [sic], no matter how
your crucified, nailed to the cross at home, or in your personal relationships,
or on the job that you can rise if you don’t lose yourself during the hard times
and the challenges.”
T
he reverend with no known flock aside from his fellow black racists
went on to nonsensically explain, “The story of Jesus on the cross, no matter
what they humiliated him with, no matter how they mocked him he took it, because
he knew he could rise. And the story of Easter and my message for this Easter
session is no matter what unearned suffering you go through, that if you know
you can rise above it, don’t become like the diseases that you
fight.”
He added that, (not in any way drawing a Jesus comparison!),
“President Obama . . . he’s been able to rise politically again.”
Equally unsubtle in her denigration of Easter, the FLOTUS, Michelle
Obama, is turning this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll into a political
extravaganza . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=36688.)
