
Morning Evening
John 18 vs 1 – 19 vs 42
By the wonders of modern technology I enjoyed a game of “Bananagram” yesterday with my daughter in London. It’s a word game, a bit like scrabble. She had a bag full of letters and I had also had a bag that I had bought from a thrift store. We both started making as many words as we could with the letters. Unusually, I won the game quite easily. My daughter queried the result and asked me to check my letters. It turned out that the bag of letters that I was playing was different to hers. For instance, my bag had no “Js”. She had two “Js”. The previous owner of my game obviously tried to make the game easier by taking out the difficult letters to use.
On this Good Friday, we remember that Jesus did not skip over the difficult parts of life. He did not look to make life easier. In our Easter celebrations we don’t rush to Easter Sunday. We don’t take out the suffering of the Cross. We remember that Jesus endured a horrible death on our behalf. There is no Easter without the horror of Good Friday.