While he was the Senior Minister at Riverside Church in New York City, William Sloane Coffin famously preached that we are tempted to believe we live in a “Good Friday world.” In a Good Friday world, everything is on an irreversible march toward an inevitable death. It is a place of pessimism and broken-heartedness. I think he has a point. We have accepted decay and decline as inevitable. We have grown accustomed to our pain. We have too quickly turned a blind eye to the unpleasant parts of life — and of ourselves. We have given in too easily to the inevitabilities of life and simply settled for half-hearted living.
Coffin continues by saying that the resurrection means that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, this is an Easter world after all:
By all appearances, it is a Good Friday world. But by the light of Easter… love never dies, not with God, and not even with us. Christ is risen, pro nobis, for us, to put love in our hearts, decent thoughts in our heads, and a little more iron up our spines. Christ is risen to convert us, not from life to something more than life, but from something less than life to the possibility of full life itself.
The sermon concludes with a penetrating question: “Are we going to continue the illusion of the Good Friday world, or start living the reality of an Easter one?” In other words, will we face life in fear of death and failure, or will we face death with hope of new life?
To live in the Easter world of the resurrection is to walk in a new way that leads us back into the world on God’s new terms. “If anyone is in Christ,” wrote Paul, “there is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17) If there is new creation, then we who occupy it are made new, too.
The first witnesses to the resurrection — though most fled the scene on Good Friday — returned transformed from the inside out. Meeting the risen Jesus affected every facet of their lives, giving them inner strength, freedom from guilt, love for their enemies, and boldness to stand for what they believed was right. What about you? What needs to happen in your life for you to live in the reality of Easter? What forgiveness do you need to seek — or offer? What do you need to do to grow in trustworthiness? What regrets, pains, and wounds might need to be turned over and released to God’s care? What riches, capacities, ideas, and talents need to be dedicated to God’s service through the church? How must our church be re-fitted for usefulness to God?
As we anticipate Easter, consider your own response to the new reality God has inaugurated in Jesus Christ. What happens when we live in a way that refuses to let death and decay have the final word — when we trust, risk giving ourselves over to Jesus completely, and experience the very embrace of God in the living of our days? What might happen if we treated the world around us with the same redemptive Spirit we have met in him?
Let’s find out together.
Grace and Peace,