McWorld Expediency v. Good Friday

Just got home from a spectacularly thoughtful Good Friday service at church. Reflecting on the brutality and pain of the cross often makes me think about Jesus' other, much more expedient option to do what he came to do.

If Jesus' mission in one sense could be described as taking back what was his by virtue of creation but had been handed over to evil by virtue of our rebellion, then the cross wasn't the only way he could have accomplished his mission.

In Luke 4, Jesus is wrestling with Satan. He has been fasting for forty days. He is hungry and tired and weak. And Satan comes at him with a very interesting proposition:

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours."

Now in one sense, of course, it was a lie, like all of Satan's words are lies. If Jesus had indeed worshiped there, the resulting anarchy and chaos would have been so incredibly destructive that the earth as we know it just might have ceased to exist.

But in another sense, the offer was true. The kingdoms were his to give. And here we have the expedient way, the quick way to take back what was rightfully Jesus'. No cross. No pain. No torture. No abandonment. Just a pain-free worship experience.

But Jesus would have none of it: Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'"

And there the road forks. He had the opportunity for a short-cut, a quicker, neater, painless way to accomplish his appointed ends. He chose instead the way of submission to his Father's will. That submission led him to the pain and agony of "Good" Friday.

Obedience sometimes takes us past what seems to us to be the obvious way to accomplish what needs to be done. Sometimes what seems to be the obvious and quick answer isn't the way that of our Father. Submission to God might lead us to dying a really hard death of a dream or a goal or a hope or a plan...or maybe hundreds of small deaths.

American culture has produced the vast empire that is the fast-food industry. It is built on the cultural values of expediency and convenience and painless-ness. Jesus, instead, invites us into a long obedience in the same direction that leads us to places we would rather not go. He goes there before us and he invites us to follow him into it.

We do not enter into and embrace this pain and these deaths for the sheer "value" of pain. Pain in and of itself springs from the fall and it has no value, one day (praise God) it will be no more.

Instead, we enter into the pain and the deaths as God directs us in step with Jesus, who has not only walked this way before us but has also already redeemed this way. There is joy set before him as he endures the cross. It is the true again-making of all things, the power and authority to take back all that is rightfully his so that one day it will all be made new, right, whole again.

And so there is also joy set before us. But there is no short-cut to true joy. True joy requires that we go the way of the cross. There is no other path--not for Jesus, not for us.