Its three hours till easter and good Friday was just yesterday. Lent is over tomorrow and I have just finished writing (gave up on) another blog because I realized something. I rant. I don’t how something is going so I rant about it, then once I have said what I needed, cursed 10 times had half a beer and realized that the particular blog that I had been ranting in is only 1-- words I rant. I keep going with the same idea until every dead horse feels beaten. Well Im down have a beer, “Shit” makes 10 and now onto what I really want to write about.
Malia has been reading and writing a lot of blogs about lent, the majority of them she abandons before posting them because they aren’t just right. And I totally get that, there have been many times over the past 39 days that I have wanted to talk about the lent machine, the holiday machine and what the fuck a bunny has to do with a dead man walking the earth. I have been conflicted because one, I don’t get a lot of comments and the readership of this blog seems to be primarily my wife and I, so sometimes I get the feeling that my questions are frivolous, or the more likely option, I frustrate people beyond wanting to discuss my blog with me. But to whatever end, here goes.
Easter and lent are stupid, good Friday rocks
I don’t like easter for the same reasons that I don’t like christmas, they are primarily about candy (like) and consumerism (dislike) they also have nothing to do with the christian implication. I know that there are resurrection eggs but thats all crap and the church knows it. If easter was a real holiday that christians celebrated like they should. Easter would look a lot more like st. Paddies day, than the pastel, easter dress holiday that it is. Let me break down what I’ve just said and explain myself before you think Im crazy (I am crazy though). Christ our lord and savior, who was dead crucified under pontius pilot, beaten, pierced, abandoned. Prepared for burial, interned in a rich mans tomb. A tomb whose door was covered with a boulder the size of a man, and then sealed with tar. Most likely making it pretty air tight, oh and it had two roman guards who were not going to ideally going to stand by if they thought the zombie apocalypse was starting with jesus. So jesus puts the soldiers to sleep, moves the boulder down the road, walks out from the tomb and then starts showing everybody his wounds all over the place. Ya that holiday needs partying and shooting guns in the air and drinking and running to everyones house, ringing their door bell before we kick the door in to shout “HE HAS RISEN” just before we run to the next house to do in kind. At no point should that day be marked with vinegar soaked hard boiled eggs.Lent, the spirit of it is to make you fast for the lord. You give up something so that you the time you would have spent doing that thing is now spent longing and thinking on the lord. I absolutely think that some people do lent right. But the majority of, “Im giving up ______” insert sugar, chocolate, facebook, twitter people or those who think they are experiencing what jesus experienced in the desert are fools. Jesus was tempted for 40 days in the desert, he did not eat or drink and I would assume sleep was not a regular thing either. While in the desert he was tempted, not by a demon, not by an underling, but by satan, lucifer himself. The baddy of all baddies took the job of tempting jesus, and MY guess would be that if temped by the devil himself none of us pathetic humans would stand a chance. Adam and eve fell. Jesus didn’t. He didn’t fall for the tricks, he didn’t get fed up with the taunting, he didn’t do what we would have done. He was tempted every second on everyday, through it all he prayed. If you think giving up chocolate gives you any idea what that was like you are stupid. Chocolate is not like giving up eating, or showing your divine power to shut up the bad guy. Its not like falling to all temptation, all at once while you are being tempted by the A-team. Lent degrades what jesus went through by making us think we knew what it was like. I don’t participate in lent, because if I did. I would quit my job sit on my floor and pray for 40 days like a seraph still only partly realizing how unworthy I am of his love and redemption.
Why then is good Friday the best. Well it is simple, thats the day it all went down. The day the curtain was torn, the day the earth shook, the day the blood and water flowed. Ya it is a sad day, a hard day to realize what has been done for you, but we have to realize that that is the ultimate communion, his life our sins. And not just those sins or the past sins. My today sins...PAID my maybe sins...PAID my tomorrow sins...PAID. A church I no longer go to or support said it best, you get to heaven, you get to the gate, and peter hands you a bill. You open it and its pages are more numerous than an original iPhone bill. Pages cascade to the floor in a waterfall of sins and sin debt. You riffle through all the pages frantic to see if you can afford all this sin and still get into heaven. When you get to the bottom you see PAID. No matter how much sin is on your bill, no matter how long you have lived or how terrible you have been while you were here, the bottom line still says Paid in full. Good Friday is the culmination of that payment. It is the day that your sins are payed, its not Christmas, its not your baptism, its good Friday, its the day Jesus died for you. His body and blood.
In an hour, it will be the day he rose. I only wish I could kick in door without getting sent to jail.
