A couple of people asked me, perhaps because they imagine that no one would choose to be baptized without understanding in full detail this thing called Christianity, why Good Friday is Good, as it involves some not-so-good things happening to our main man Jesus: people being selfish, petty, unjust, cruel, and all too concerned with keeping their own skins intact to do anything for a man who was good and kind, who healed hearts and minds and bodies.

The first answer I gave was that it’s Good Friday because it was good for us humans, the day when salvation was won for us. God accepted the penalty of sin on himself and that’s what gets us into heaven rather than that other place. But while this may be true theologically it doesn’t really justify the word “good” – only, perhaps, “necessary” or “merciful”. To see only transgress and retribution in the cross is to see the world and the divine economy as something less than it is. It makes God into nothing more than a Cosmic Judge who enforces a set of rules that are arbitrary and purely normative, binding only, as in the words we’ve all heard from authority figures, “Because I Say So”.

Put another way: it is all too easy in a society and economic system founded on the principles of utilitarianism to develop an impoverished ontology of goodness. Things are never just good, only good because. Money is good because it lets you provide for yourself and others; my job is good because it earns me enough money; college was good because I learned the skills for a career. Good because is just a shell game. It seems to hold our society together; it certainly has a way of driving spiralling patterns of debt and consumption. But to say that Good Friday was good because it gets us out of going to hell is to stop well short of a full explanation.

At the Easter Vigil one of the readings is the creation story found in the book of Genesis. Over the course of a week, God creates the heavens and the earth. The description of each day ends with the same line: “And God saw that it was good”. Here, I think, is the good we are looking for, an absolute and intrinsic goodness that does not depend on utility or adherence to some arbitrary set of rules. God didn’t need to make the world. He has no need for an oak tree. He doesn’t need to use language arbitrarily, to make up some word “good” to describe things (but this is a subject for a much longer essay). If God thinks something is good, it’s because it is.

What do we make of “Good” Friday, then? In the grand scheme of things it was a day like every other: some humans were cruel to some other humans, justice was not served, expediency and the state triumphed over human things, and there was a great deal of suffering. There doesn’t seem to be any justification for calling Friday Good in any absolute sense. There also, as probably everyone has felt many, many times, doesn’t seem to be much justification for calling the world good, either. It’s hard to forgive God for making the world with so much suffering in it; it’s pretty much impossible to forgive him for giggling up there in heaven like a stoned teenager and calling it good while we all eat shit for dinner. Perhaps we are justified, like the anarchist Gregory in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, in wanting to burn down the world.

Perhaps, but if the story of Good Friday is true, then the world really is Good, because God liked it enough to come down here and be in it with us.

(cdm | GoodFriday)