Aly Hawkins

Here’s what we know: A good man—a man who had talked a lot about loving God and others, and who had done some things no one could explain, and who had enough of a following to make the higher-ups nervous—was executed by the state.

Here’s what we don’t know: What that physical event—a good man’s execution—meant metaphysically . . . if anything at all.

Did that good man satisfy the penalty for humanity’s sin, suffering God’s wrath on our behalf? Was there some kind of transaction between Good and Evil, freeing humanity from captivity? Was Death put to death forever? Was the man demonstrating the end-that-is-a-beginning of Love that refuses power? Did the man, by his death, finish something begun by God in Israel—or, perhaps, start a new chapter in that story?

Or maybe nothing happened, cosmically speaking. Maybe a good man died, and people have spent a couple millennia imbuing his death with meanings that have met their particular needs in their particular times.

This last could be true. If there was no possibility of it being true, faith would be unnecessary. No one who investigates and contemplates the events of that Friday so long ago will ever find proof that the man’s death meant something; there is evidence that points toward Something Meaningful—but evidence is not proof.

I find the evidence compelling enough to make this humble statement of faith: I can’t pin down, on a cosmic scale, what happened on Friday—what price was paid, what battle was fought, what story was finished, begun or continued—but I am becoming free because of it.

Because of what happened on Friday, I am becoming free to accept God’s love and to love others. I am becoming free to choose love over fear, which grasps at power to avoid pain and death. I am becoming free to live in the story of redemption that God has been writing from the beginning of time, offering my small stories of life and love to the Grand Narrative of Life and Love.

What happened on Friday is happening in me.

Filed under: life, theology Tagged: | atonement theories, faith, Good Friday, Jesus