Today is Good Friday

Perhaps we in America now have a sense of the despair and
hopelessness shared by the followers of Jesus on Good Friday
2,000 years ago. How could the loving God we had been taught about from our earliest days allow such terror and devastation and death of innocents as we witnessed September 11?

Certainly, the anguish at Golgotha on that dark, stormy Good Friday must have been the same. With so little explanation, a cluster of friends watched their son, their friend, their teacher humiliated, taunted, tortured and killed. Over and over, they must have asked: Why this wickedness and pain? Why is this happening?

Didn’t we all share the same despair on September 11? How could a loving, compassionate God permit such a heartless, cruel act of destruction and the vanquished lives of thousands of innocent mothers and fathers, children, friends, neighbors — heroes all?

In the wake of our national tragedy, and our ongoing struggle to understand how this tragedy could have occurred, we can find a guide for our faith in the example of Jesus on Good Friday. The two robbers being crucified with him on Good Friday challenged Jesus to prove he was the Son of God and save himself — and them. His reply spoke of the future with confidence. “Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise,” he said.

Certainly, this response in the midst of the gloom must have mystified all who watched Jesus that day. Yet that confidence also helped inspire the faithful disciples in their early years of persecution and doubt as they established the base of the church we know today.

Are we not searching for that same faith and assurance today? And what in response will we build?

In our own personal despair and yearning in those turbulent days last fall, we turned to nature for solace, walking in silence along the ocean, digging up dirt of a new garden, planting seedlings and flower bulbs by the dozens. These scaly, peeling, seemingly lifeless nuggets with scraggly roots were planted in despair, yet with hope. Now, five months later, we look forward to the array of yellow and white daffodil blooms — with a tinge of red — that are our tribute to those who died and the evidence of our yearning and search and at last of our hope and confidence. We will watch in wonder as two scrawny bags of twigs outside our window transform — growing in the years ahead to become two giant, brilliantly colored crepe myrtles. We call them the Twin Towers.

Like many, we have also come to savor ever more the touch and importance of family and friends. We are writing more letters. We are making more phone calls, We are holding hands more. We are making a greater effort to be with our children and brothers and sisters and cousins. Family traditions have been rediscovered and enriched.

From Jesus’ response to his despairing and mystified friends and family on Good Friday, there followed the understanding and belief that prompted John to write the scripture 2,000 years ago that has been so inspiring for us today — that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can not extinguish it.” Even after our despair, that light of our own faith allows us to look with inspiration and confidence and hope that our new sense of priorities will endure, radiating in the eyes of our children and friends, in our daffodils and the windblown branches of our “Twin Towers.”

— Haydee and Jim Toedtman