I'm not going to go into a big religious hoo-ha about Jesus on Good Friday because a) I don't want to -- I'm Lutheran, and we are shut-the-door-and-pray kind of people, I don't care what the evangelicals say and b) I don't think I'm right and every other religion on Earth is wrong. I'm not going to shove my Jesus down your throat. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, religious right.
That said, Good Friday always makes me think about grace. And grace is a pretty incredible concept, really. Evolutionary reptile-brain-that-wants-to-dominate-and-eat-you/original sin = same thing to me. Basically, I think humans are sort of hardwired assholes. We don't mean to be. When we sit and think about it, we'd really like to be nice people with lots of friends and admirers. But then someone dangles ONLY ONE IPAD and all hell breaks loose. Seriously. We can try to fool ourselves that we'd starve to give a total stranger the last piece of bread, but we wouldn't. We might give it to our children, but that is different.
So. Grace.
Grace is cool because it basically acknowledges the inherent assholiness of the human race. It doesn't say that you can necessarily make up for all of your bad stuff by picking up trash on the side of the road (which is still a good idea) or buying a new building for your religious organization (and anyone who thinks that will get them into heaven -- and there are a lot of people who do -- are so totally missing the point). In fact, grace insists that really? There is nothing you can do. You're an asshole.
But we love you, anyway.
Grace is what we give our kids, the little shits. They constantly demand our full attention, want to eat candy every second of the day even though we want them to eat good food so they will grow up healthy and strong. They sneak around behind our backs and present angelic faces when we confront them with their misdeeds. We punish them, we reason with them, we might even tell them stories about why they should do what we ask, but they still don't get it.
They are us before we learned to fake it.
And we love them, anyway.
We really wish they would just listen. We reward them when they do listen. We know in our heart of hearts that they might really want to please us and also really want to know IN A WAY THEY CAN'T IGNORE what will happen if they feed the cat a Hershey's bar.
And they come to us and say they are sorry because they want our love and approval. And we understand that they are going to mess up again and again, because that is part of learning and growing and becoming a better person. And we love them, too.
And so we forgive them.
Whether or not you believe in the story of Easter, I think we can all be thankful for the concept of grace. Happy Good Friday, world.
