GOOD FRIDAY has been free to date of the tendency to commercialise and secularise religious holidays. So far, there are no noticeable efforts by card makers to cash in on it nor have the windows of the best department stores been decorated with Good Friday themes. For the message of Good Friday is stark and challenging: it asks questions to which there are no easy, slick, commercial or profitable answers.
The mainstream churches share a lengthy but common reading today from Saint John's Gospel (John 18:1 - 19:42). It is a desolate story of isolation, betrayal, false accusation, miscarriage of justice, denial, abdication of responsibility, rejection of ambition, questioning of values, torture, vilification, crass power play, humiliation, dehumanisation, abandonment and - ultimately - cruel death. And yet it is a story in which gentle tenderness and compassionate love continually break through the walls of hatred and in which light persistently pierces through the dark. It is a story for today for it is the story of our world.
On this day, Christ is taken to be executed outside the city walls. On this evening, He is buried hastily outside those same city walls. In his dying and in his death, he is placed forcibly outside the city limits and beyond the realm of civil society. Who is placed outside the limits of our society today? Pushed to the margins and beyond the boundaries to places for which we no longer feel responsibility, where we are no longer called to have compassion or challenged to show love?
The sad stories where love and compassion fail to break through are told throughout our cities this day. There are the experiences of Polish workers, for instance, who are isolated and marginalised, those whose only social life is with one another and those who are the victims of racist taunts and - as recent events have demonstrated - appalling violence. Despite popular myths, figures show that immigrants are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators; a disproportionate number of immigrant children end up in hospitals; and too many immigrants are over-qualified for the jobs they do here.
Those who are pushed beyond the walls of our cities to the margins of civic life must find it easy to identify with the Christ who is crucified on a hill outside the city, with the Christ who is buried on the margins and the edges, beyond polite society. But today's reading from Saint John's Gospel is not the end of the story. The end is not one of rejection, injustice and eternal marginalisation. Rather, the climax of this story is in the triumph of the Resurrection on Easter Day when night becomes morning, when darkness turns to light, when despair is redeemed by hope and when hatred is conquered by love.
That Easter message is not easy to package and commercialise. But it challenges us to look again at how we value the new lives and the new life among us, to ask how we can welcome in from the margins those who should be accepted and embraced within our civic, political and polite society.