I think I can say I get it. Christians seem bent on taking a happy marshmallow-Peeps-filled Sunday and instead making it about some grisly execution 2,000 years ago. I think I get the confusion of those outside the church because for the bulk of my life I was not a follower of Jesus and had no interest in it. To me it seemed like a bunch of angry and boring male chauvinists protesting things I had nothing against. Add to that the fact that they hung everything on this very old book that seemed like it had an awful lot of holes.
Let me tell you what changed my mind. Not that I think it will necessarily change yours - but then, that is the beauty of the op-ed, eh?
I started looking into my doubts and found there was much more evidence for the accuracy of the scriptures than I would have ever thought - a jarring amount. I started to look into the way it described God and what he has gone through for me.
A key teaching of the Bible is that God is not one person like we are, but a united being who is at once three and one. Not three gods, not one with multiple personality disorder. It is called the Trinity.
The scriptures and Roman history point to the crucifixion of Jesus, who the Bible states clearly as the part of God that came to earth. He expressed the heart of God physically while he was here. He touched people who no one (in the Jewish culture or out of it) would ever touch. He healed people; he valued everyone. Everyone.
But this week, Christians everywhere celebrate his death, so let's get to that. Let's skip to that horrid Friday (even though I get why we call it "Good Friday," I still hate that name). And let's think about what God went through to give us a chance to reconnect with Him and to live the full life He would call us to live.
On that day, God experienced the worst suffering I could imagine in three simultaneous directions. God the Father watched his son be brutally killed for something he didn't deserve - for something he didn't do. As the father of three kids myself, I cannot fathom how painful it must have been for God to watch that. God the Son (Jesus) physically experienced that pain. He had whips embedded with bits of bone literally tear chunks of his skin off; he was beaten and then had nails driven into his hands and feet and was then raised on the cross to slowly and painfully suffocate.
Finally, God the Sprit had to stand by and watch it happen and not intervene even though he had the power to do so. He had to let what had to happen, well, happen.
The combination of being slowly killed, watching your son be killed and having to not use the power available to you and let it happen is unimaginable. I wish it wasn't necessary, but the scriptures make it clear that it was. God makes the rules. And while this was awfully violent and grisly, the main point here is that God took it all on himself. He decided it was necessary because of what we had done. He diagnosed the problem, and took the medicine personally. Regardless of whether you ever decide that you agree with God's assessment of the universe and humanity within it, you deserve to know that you are loved enough that God would do that for you. Christ's death and then resurrection gives us life.
That is what John says in his famous quote, "For God loved the world so much that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will never taste spiritual death."
Please know I don't kid myself about this. I have only taken swipes at issues that are massive in this discussion, the accuracy of the scriptures, how/why does a God who claims to be good allow such suffering, even what are the implications for my life of all this ... My book "Should We Fire God?" is 65,000 words and 275 pages and even that is not enough. This is just for me to jump into the conversation.
I still don't like everything the Bible says all the time; I still wish God would stop more suffering than he does, but two things are clear. He loves us beyond what I can grasp. And He plays by his own rules.