In the last 10 minutes of Good Friday, I felt I should actually put up some reflections on what I’ve been thinking about.

Many people comment on the death of Christ as for our sins, some even as an archetype of obedience to God; but my sins were not all that got nailed to that Cross on the first Good Friday. Remember, a week previous to this, we had crowds shouting Hosanna about the Jesus we see today on a cross. What also dies there were the false messainic hopes of Jesus’ followers. As if the riding of Jesus into Jerusalem would signal the beginning of the Rule of Jesus and the end to hardships. They had a false view of the messiah, as sometimes I do.

Often I bemoan the problems in my own life. I think about how I’m still single, and I go to a seminary that’s extremely liberal, and all that stuff. I wait for Jesus to come riding into the Jerusalem of my life and make everything grand in the way I think it should be.

Jesus does make all things right, but I forget that the call of Jesus is both one to suffering on a cross, and a call to defeat the powers of sin, death, and evil in my own life and in the world. In a world that seeks to kill God at every turn, what should be surprising me is that my adversities are so laughably light while I seek to follow the Lord.

So today, as the Lord says “it is finished”, I pray that I can remember to put to death all the false hopes that can get in the way of the one true hope, that will be revealed in glory on the third day.