Joseph Pearce On Good Friday

 What Makes Good Friday Special?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Good Friday is very special. It is not only a “good” day, it is perhaps the best of all days, at least when taken in conjunction with Easter Sunday. It is, after all, the day on which we are redeemed from sin and become inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. Days don’t get any better than that!” Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  From our friend Joseph Pearce, who, by the way, writing at TheImaginativeConservative.com, Pearce writes about the trinity of Easter and about the – I’m trying to pull it up right now.  “What Makes This Good Friday Extra Special?”

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Good Friday is very special. It is not only a “good” day, it is perhaps the best of all days, at least when taken in conjunction with Easter Sunday. [Mike: That’s what made me think about this. You don’t get the resurrection unless you get the crucifixion.] It is, after all, the day on which we are redeemed from sin and become inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. Days don’t get any better than that! And yet I am tempted to claim, indeed I’m tempted to exclaim, that this particular Good Friday is extra special, that it has something about it that most other Good Fridays don’t have. In making such a claim, I expect to raise the eyebrows and perhaps even the ire of those who understand the supreme significance of this holiest of days. How can one Good Friday be better than any other? How can anyone claim that this year will be a Very Good Friday, whereas last year was only a Fairly Good Friday? Heaven forbid that anyone should say such a thing!

I am, of course, not saying such a thing.

Heaven forbid!

And yet….

And yet I am still saying that this particular Good Friday is indeed extra special!

Perhaps I should explain.

What makes this Good Friday extra special is that it falls on March 25. Those who know the Christian calendar will recognize the significance of this date. [Mike: Pearce is onto something here. Did anyone else pick up on this?] It is the Feast of the Annunciation, the date on which the Archangel Gabriel declared unto Mary that she would conceive of the Holy Ghost. It is the date on which Mary does conceive of the Holy Ghost. The date on which God becomes Man. The date on which the Word becomes Flesh. As a date, it is far more important than the Feast that happens nine months later, on December 25, because life begins at conception, not at birth.

So am I claiming that this particular Good Friday is extra special because it coincides with the Annunciation, conjoining the Incarnation with the Crucifixion, the feast with the fast, the Life with the Death? Up to a point, perhaps, but this is not the principal reason for the extra-special status of this particular Good Friday.

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I make the claim primarily not because March 25 is the date of the Annunciation but because it is the historical date of the Crucifixion. This is often forgotten [Mike: I talked about this last Thursday, that Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian, chronicled the late history of Jesus of Nazareth, with dates.] because we celebrate Good Friday as a movable feast. It is commemorated on a different date each year. We forget that the Crucifixion happened on one particular day, on one particular date, in history. That day, that date, was March 25.

At this point, the skeptic is raising his eyebrows and his ire for the second time. “How do you know the date of the Crucifixion?” he seems to say. “Were you there?”

Well, as a matter of fact I was. It was I and my sins that put the hatred into the hand that hammered the nails into Our Lord’s flesh. The Word was made flesh, and I butchered it.

But this is not the reason that I know that Our Lord was crucified on March 25. I know it because the tradition of the Church teaches it.

No doubt, the skeptic is now raising his ireful eyebrows for a third time. “How authoritative is the tradition of the Church in such matters? Was the Church there? Was the Church standing at the foot of the Cross?” Well, actually She was. She was present when Christ told His Mother to behold St. John as her son, and when He told St. John to behold the Virgin as his mother. [Mike: By the way, they get that part of it very right and very dramatically in Passion of the Christ.]

The skeptic is unimpressed by such theological niceties. He cuts to the chase: “How does the Church know the exact date on which the Crucifixion happened? Aren’t such details lost in the mists of time? Why trust ‘tradition’ in these matters?”

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Mike:  Folks, last segment what did we talk about?  We talked about tradition, that tradition is what hands down this moral code we call the magisterium from generation to generation.  I encourage some people to read some of Melvin E. Bradford’s books.  One of them is A Better Guide Than Reason.  What does Bradford say is a better guide than reason?  A better guide than reason is tradition.  That’s the point of Bradford’s book.  It’s a great book, by the way.

As I was telling you, with the governor’s veto of this bill, the tradition is that government is supposed to be for the benefit of all.  The government cannot be for my benefit if it refuses to defend that which I was put on the earth to practice so that I can get my soul back to Heaven or to pass through the narrow gate.  No government can be a good government that doesn’t do that.  The government of the State of Georgia is corrupt and it’s rotten, to the core, like an apple that’s got worms in it.  Back to Pearce:

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My reply is simple enough. I am a miserable sinner and yet, in spite of this, I remember the date on which my father died, and the date on which my mother died. Do we really suppose that the Blessed Virgin would ever forget the date on which she saw her own son nailed to a tree, watching Him die in agony?

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Mike:  I love this angle, I have to tell you.  I’ve made this argument to people before.  [mocking] “Mr. Church, please!  You can’t possibly expect anyone to follow your stupid little tradition there.”  All right.  Is St. John stupid, too?  Is St. John corrupted?  Is St. John an imbecile?  Is St. John a heretic?  Is St. John wrong?  When you say “Were you there?” no, but he was.  If you believe the gospels he was.

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[reading]

Do we really suppose that St. John would forget the date on which he saw his lord and master die? Or that Mary Magdalene would forget the date that she saw her lord die? They were all there. They saw it. The date would have been branded on their memory for the rest of their lives. And what of the ten miserable disciples who ran away? Would they be likely to forget the date of their day of shame?

It is clear, therefore, that the date of the Lord’s Crucifixion would have been well-known to the early Church and that this is the very source of the tradition that I have no trouble accepting as true.

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Mike:  You see, Pearce – [mocking] “Pearce, please.  You see what your problem is here is you have humiliated yourself.  You have humbled yourself before tradition.  You’re comfortable with that.  Why don’t you invoke your pride and just say that I read the same books as the rest of you and I don’t find that conclusion correct?”

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And this is the reason for my claim that this particular Good Friday is extra special. It’s not often that we commemorate the fast-day of Our Lord’s Death on the actual anniversary of the date on which it happened in history. And the fact that it also happens to be the feast of the Annunciation makes it even better!

May the joy of the Incarnation, the sorrow of the Crucifixion and the glory of the Resurrection be with all imaginative conservatives during these Holy Days.

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End Mike Church Show Transcript