The Evening Star (April 19, 1946)
Editorial: Good Friday, 1946
Living generations of people should comprehend Good Friday better than those men and women who lived in earlier and less dynamic times ever could. Even little children have been educated by events, so that they understand what suffering and sorrow mean. Their parents have witnessed two global wars. Within the experience of uncounted millions existence has become steadily more and more dangerous. The security, the worldwide peace, the honorable happiness which they have sought have been denied them. Instead of safety and fellowship, they have found only increasing peril, advancing contention. Their prospect on the anniversary of the crucifixion is dark. They have an obvious kinship with the watchers on Golgotha the while the Saviour died.
As seen in 1946, the original Good Friday represented the triumph of evil over the values about which Christ had talked in the Sermon on the Mount – righteousness, charity and brotherhood. So long as it endured it constituted a complete eclipse of divine power, a blacking out of the light of love and mercy everywhere. Jesus, mocked and reviled, truly perished upon the cross. His doctrine of the kingdom of God in this earth was contradicted by a mob. Elias did not appear to save Him. He cried out in agony “with a loud voice” and yielded His spirit to the infinite. Reaction was victorious. The enemies of His teaching had destroyed Him.
Such is the story that Saint Matthew and the other authors of the synoptic Gospels tell. Modern men and women reading it cannot fail to discover points of tragic resemblance with their own disastrous era. For them, too, Christ has been betrayed, His disciples abused, His mission frustrated. Nearly two thousand years have brought forth a fruitage of death and the promise of still more frightful destruction. Now as on the first Good Friday the planet quakes, the rocks are rent and fear runs rampant among multitudes.
But living generations have a vast advantage over those of the time of Jesus. They know the answer to their tremendous question. It springs instinctively to their minds, rises like a flame in their hearts. The centuries have not waxed and faded for nothing. Every nation has been instructed in the lesson of Christian civilization. Nobody can pretend to be ignorant of the Golden Rule of mutual honesty, mutual tolerance, mutual trust. The Saviour did not die in vain. After the defeat of the earliest Good Friday there dawned the primary Easter. Men and women who read these words are fortunate in that very largely they have in their hands the power to govern their own fate, the fate of their sons and daughters, the fate of the world. No second miracle of resurrection is required. Out of the garden of Arimathea there came all the help that struggling humanity needs. The tomb was not the end of Christ’s incarnation. Neither is it the end of humanity’s pilgrimage. Perhaps because it is so dark today, the coming Easter may be the more glorious.