Good Friday is the Christian Holy Day that commemorates the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Good Friday services focus on the Seven Last Words that Jesus spoke from the cross; and the Stations of the Cross that follow the events of the day -- from Jesus being condemned to die, to being nailed to the cross, to being laid in the tomb.
Some of the most powerful meditations on the cross have been by master artists who, over the last thousand years and longer, have helped believers to grown in faith and understanding. These images of the crucifixtion can all be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. HuffPost Religion thanks The Metropolitan Museum for providing these images for this Good Friday meditation.
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Lately I have been thinking about the crucifixion of Jesus and how such a macabre symbol of execution as the cross has become a symbol of hope for believers in Jesus. It is both bizarre and extraordinary.
The "mystery of the cross" is an invitation for believers to reflect on the willingness of their Creator to suffer the worst degradation imaginable by someone like them--and so unlike them so as to redeem them from their sins.
It is Mark's shattered and shattering Gospel that demands close Christian attention, before we move up and away from it to the joyous epiphany of Sunday morning. Good Friday Christianity puts the agony in the ecstasy, insisting that there is no other way.
Good Friday is a day that leaves us spinning with questions about the nature of God. Is God's hand in this? Or does this crazy world spin accidentally? How do we know?
I peered into the Incarnation's beauty: Jesus is fully God and fully human. He didn't merely act like a human; he wasn't a human-like wraith. He was God living a genuinely human life, which means God himself begged for mercy on a dark night.
I don't know what Good Friday felt like for Jesus' followers, but I imagine there must have been a profound sense of evil, a terrible fear that the Devil had spilled sacred blood and won -- just as Rwandans must have felt when genocide struck.
To me, the most comforting part of Holy Week is not the waving of triumphal palms on one Sunday morning, or the flowers and joyous hymns on the next. It's what happens in between.
The question is what we should make of this proximity of calendars and neighbors: what course should relations among religious groups take in 21st century America?
This is my aunt's Ecce Homo, of the Crucifiction, which she won an Iowa watercolor award in 1953. I am trying to track down some of her other images for a graduate project I am working on at University of Delaware.. I suspect a lot of her work exists in private homes and museums in the Midwest and also the S.F. Bay area where she lived in the 1970s. She did not always sign her work. Her work was both secular and religious. If this or any of her work looks familiar, please let me know! Thank you. Happy Easter and Passover! http://nunartist.com/known-work/religious/ecce-homo-1953/
nunartist: This is my aunt's Ecce Homo, of the Crucifiction, which
Thumbs down on being ignorant of Hebrew, and not grasping that the word "pecel" in the commandment in question refers to idols (particularly, fertility-cult idols) that were carved/hewn out of stone or wood. In case you didn't know it, a two-dimensional painting is not a solid three-dimensional fertility-cult fetish carved out of stone.
MirrorMonkey: Thumbs down on being ignorant of Hebrew, and not grasping
'What Job suddenly understood was that it was not him, but God Himself, who was actually on trial in Job's calamities, and He failed the test miserably. Even more pointedly, I am tempted to risk a radical anachronistic reading: Job foresaw God's own future suffering- "Today it's me, tomorrow it will be your own son, and there will be no one to intercede for him. What you see in me now is the prefiguration of your own Passion!" ' --Slavoj Zizek, "The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity" p. 126-127
chrysostomos: 'What Job suddenly understood was that it was not him,
Well gee, I just did a classical guitar concert featuring pieces by Vivaldi, Bach and adaptations of Brian May/Freddie Mercury compositions.
Would that count?
Let's go over the meaning of the word 'militant.'. We'll use history to illustrate out point.
Militant anti-semitism gets you a hitler.
Militant iSlam gets you Sept 11.
Militant Christianity gets you Crusades, Blue Laws, prohibition abortion clinic violence.
Militant atheism gets you demands for evidence and snarky smartass comments on Huffpo?
AntithiChrist: Well gee, I just did a classical guitar concert featuring
Why was it called Good Friday? Would God call it -good- Friday to see His beloved Son crucifed and beaten in such a manner to death good? God said I sent my son and you crucified Him? Would any parent call it a good day if it were their child?
sunshine14: Why was it called Good Friday? Would God call it
You should see some of stuff Nora Roberts comes up with that winds up being called good.
Plus, maybe you're not taking the entire day into account.
In the hard-to-find, vastly under-rated and banned-in-many-countries book, The Gospel According To Godfry, God's cleaning lady's second son's guidance councillor's ex-girlfriend, Nancy, had just won a big lotto, and gave all credit and 90% of the take to the newly formed, and seriously under-funded "Jews for Jesus," which actually got the whole Christianity thing off the ground, sotospeak.
The whole reassurection bit was allegory.
AntithiChrist: You should see some of stuff Nora Roberts comes up
My dear friend it is Good Friday in obedience to God having made it; as with creation what God made is good, it is what man does to it, which is questionable. He is Risen!
Watching_rock_grow: My dear friend it is Good Friday in obedience to
Looking at the images of Jesus on a cross historical evidence shows that Jesus did not die on a cross.
The book The Non-Christian Cross, by J. D. Parsons (London, 1896), says: “There is not a single sentence in any of the numerous writings forming the New Testament, which, in the original Greek, bears even indirect evidence to the effect that the stauros used in the case of Jesus was other than an ordinary stauros; much less to the effect that it consisted, not of one piece of timber, but of two pieces nailed together in the form of a cross. . . . It is not a little misleading upon the part of our teachers to translate the word stauros as ‘cross’ when rendering the Greek documents of the Church into our native tongue, and to support that action by putting ‘cross’ in our lexicons as the meaning of stauros without carefully explaining that that was at any rate not the primary meaning of the word in the days of the Apostles, did not become its primary signification till long afterwards, and became so then, if at all, only because, despite the absence of corroborative evidence, it was for some reason or other assumed that the particular stauros upon which Jesus was executed had that particular shape.”—Pp. 23, 24; see also The Companion Bible (London, 1885), Appendix No. 162.
Thus the weight of the evidence indicates Jesus died on an upright stake not on the traditional cross.
PETER_TIMINGS: Looking at the images of Jesus on a cross historical
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Posted: 04/ 6/2012 8:42 am Updated: 04/ 6/2012 10:07 am