There’s nothing dainty about Good Friday. I was a little surprised recently when I Googled “Crucifixion Re-enactment” to find that re-enactments of the events of Good Friday are pretty frequent among some Christian groups around the world. They take place in Mexico, Syria (Damascus), Australia and other places – quite prominently in the Philippines. These pageants get down to the nitty-gritty about the human agony and suffering of Christ.
Somewhere today there is a young Filipino man who has been preparing himself mentally and training physically to enact the role of Jesus on April 2, 2010, maybe before a Super Bowl-sized crowd. It’s the opportunity of his lifetime and he’s not in it for the money. Mel Gibson might have been in it for the money, at least in part, when he produced The Passion of the Christ.
Some Christians disparaged the Gibson movie as being anti-Semitic. I think the aversion of many of those critics was really about getting too close to the intense physical suffering our Lord had to endure and God had to permit for our salvation. I identify more with the young Filipino who may actually have spikes driven through his palms than with the tut-tutters of Gibson’s movie.
We’ve done a lot of dramatizations of scripture at FPC, but I don’t think we’d try doing Good Friday. If we did it, we could start the dragging of the cross at Pleasant and Lincoln and wind up at a make-believe Golgotha in our church parking lot. Likely objections from the neighbors might cause us to move the ceremony to Skyline.
Prayer: Heavenly Father, we humbly thank you for the three greatest events in human history, which we celebrate as Christmas, Good Friday and Easter. Help us especially to remember the day on which your Son our Lord was tortured and crucified for our sake. Amen.
Stan Evans
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