Good Friday; Assessing the Meaning of Providence

Good Friday   April 18, 2025
Gen 22:1-18 Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25 John 18:1-19:37

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Good Friday is a time to ponder providence.  A central theme of the entire New Testament was to ponder the providence of the death of Jesus.  Why did it happen?  Was it necessary to happen?  How free were the agents in making it happen, if it was absolutely necessary?  Do we name somethings as providential only if there are currently perceived beneficial resulting conditions?  Can the positing of a just heavenly existence make things that happen be beneficial to the one who were victims?

How can we call the horrific genocides providential?  The Rwanda Massacre, Armenian Genocide, Khmer Rouge Killing Fields, The Holocaust, The Stalin Regime mass murders, The Mao Zedong Regime Killings.  And what about all of the so-called justified wars of invading conquerors?  Attila the Hun, Tammerlane, Genghis Khan, the oxymoronic many holy wars?  

Can the promise of heaven ever make those who died when they died freed from their terror and suffering?  Is there a limit to how good resulting providential events can rewrite terrible suffering into something good and necessary?

The Gospel of John, perhaps written in two or three phases over decades of time, has the Passion Gospel used for the Good Friday liturgy.  Being the latest written, it is written in the most providential modes.  In the words of Jesus to Pilate, one gets the impression that Jesus is not saying, "God why have you forsaken me," rather he is saying Pilate, "Sir, you are not in charge.  My angels would come and fight if God wanted them to.  You have no choice but to carry out this terrible deed for God's higher purpose."

The cross of Jesus becomes a proverbial billboard to announce in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, that Jesus is the King of the Jews.  Jesus is the Messiah.

But the writers of John's Gospel are not alone in how they characterized the death of Jesus.  Others saw Jesus and the wounded and killed Suffering Servant of Isaiah, who was an unknown figure known to Isaiah, and whose identity was speculated about by rabbis and scholars, and of course, followers of Jesus who saw this suffering figure as definitive of the life of Jesus.

Might I suggest that the death of Jesus as it came to be reported and understood by the writers of New Testament is definitive of the spiritual process of accessing the meaning of providence.

It is much easier for people who have lives of ease to boldly state that all things are well, and all manner of things will be well.  But what about real time suffering?  Is it not a profound offense against suffering to declare while suffering is happening, that "this is God's will and it is supposed to be?"

How indeed do we process history of what has happened to arrive at what we call providential?  And if we call things providential, do we retro-actively say, it had to be so and so all of the agents who caused the suffering are somehow doing God's will?  Do we absolve Judas( which happens in the gnostic Gospel of Judas), and all who caused the death of Jesus because they were just doing things according to the plan of God?

There are those who resort to historical predestination and like Paul understand God to be a potter who makes good vessels and dishonorable vessel.  And woe be to the people who have to fulfill the role of the dishonorable vessels.

Another method of appropriating positive meaning of past is to posit such a brilliant minded God that the divine mind tricks all lesser evil minds into getting them to do things according to the divine plan even when their evil minds think that they are winning.  Paul wrote that if the rulers really knew they were crucifying the king of glory they would not have done it.  In one Passion account, Jesus asks God the Father, to forgive his crucifiers for their ignorance in not knowing what they were doing.

I think that Good Friday, and the many meanings which the Passion of Jesus has been expressed by biblical writers and persons through Christian tradition, behooves us to appraise the kind of acceptance appropriate to understanding the wisdom of Providence.

Providence does not justify evil events as they occurred in their real time happening.  Evil and suffering is not providential.  What can be providential are some of the outcomes of bad events which express the hope and the resilience of people who survive with the resolve to live on in better ways.  Some times the past is too far away and the actual suffering of the event gets minimized by people who did not actually suffer.  And we must forgive ourselves for minimizing the fact that we have benefited by the sacrifice of others who have preceded us and contributed directly to the good of our lives.  That providence can seem to minimize the pain of others in the past bespeaks of the hopeful joy of the current blessing that one enjoys.  We need to forgive the Passion Gospel writers for rewriting the Passion event from their mystical perspective of having benefited from the posthumous reappearances of the Risen Christ in their lives.

And so on Good Friday, we may want to be hopeful like Julian Norwich, in confessing that "All things will be well, and all manner of things shall be well;" but let us not do so in a naive dismissal of the actual and current suffering and pain in the world.  Let not such confession be a fatalistic and passive acceptance of suffering and pain in our world such that we refuse to intervene to stop it or speak out against it in the now.

Good Friday does not mean that evil and suffering are providential when and because they occurred; it does mean that through new experiences after the suffering, there can be providential meanings that arise to assert that evil and suffering are not what is normal in life; rather goodness, love, health, safety, and justice.  Amen.