Good Friday and the God who can be trusted

After Gethsemane, Jesus walked to the cross a free man. So it is with us when we finally come to terms with “necessary losses.”

Jesus came to terms with the death of a dream, the dream that somehow the kingdom of God would come and Israel would repent and everyone would live happily ever after. This was not to be. The night in Gethsemane made this perfectly clear. He would die, and Israel would not live happily ever after.

But Jesus accepted this as God’s will. He put his trust in the God who can be trusted to bring new life out of death, new life from our crucified dreams.

Jesus walked to the cross a free man because he trusted the God who can be trusted in life and in death—even beyond death.

For the past two years I’ve been managing the estate of my deceased parents. At times it has felt like a two-year long Good Friday, without an Easter! I am so ready now for Resurrection that I can taste it. Even the pain of letting go gets old after a while. We get tired of wrestling with “letting go” and realize it’s time to move on.

Good Friday is about facing the stark reality of loss and letting go. It is about the death of a dream that perhaps never had a chance to survive in the first place. There was no way, for example, that Israel was ever going to repent and receive Jesus as the Messiah. That dream never had a chance.

And sometimes there is no way that some of our wants and needs will ever survive. Grief is the seasoning of daily life. Necessary losses are a part of life. But so is hope, as long as we trust the God who can be trusted to bring new life out of death.

The “genius” of Christianity is this core theme of death-resurrection. It reverberates throughout the life of Jesus. It is why, despite all our losses and the ongoing death of our dreams, we can walk into the future as free people. We can face losses as free people, unsaddled, unshackled, ready to let go our grip on things because we are in God’s loving grasp—no matter what.

We can trust, like Jesus, the God who can be trusted.