the greatest of these is love

Because of a fear of challenging orthodoxy, random excerpts from something you'll never hear:

I’d like to suggest to you that the most important holiday of the year – not just for Christians, but for all people – the most important holiday of the year is Good Friday. Christmas represents to us the hope of God: the hope of salvation, the promised hope of the Messiah, the hope of reconciliation between man and God. Easter represents the victorious power of God: victory over sin and darkness, victory over the world, victory over death itself. Christmas and Easter have these happy family memories, and here’s Good Friday dressed in black. How festive.

But what ultimately sets Good Friday apart, what makes Good Friday so important are two concepts that undergirds all of Christianity: love and holiness. Good Friday is ultimately about the love of God and the holiness that His love brings to us. The entirety of our faith is tied to these two concepts.

John 3:16 says that because God “so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” This message is repeated late on in 1 John 4:10, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” The gospel, the good news of God is not just that God so loved the world, but that that love drove God to turn over His own Son to die for us. God loves you every single day, yes, but only one day commemorates the single greatest display of love in the history of the universe: the death of God’s son for the sin of all mankind. On Good Friday, God loved us most.

In Leviticus 11, the Lord says, “be holy for I am holy.” It is certainly impossible to reduce a great big God into a few simple of nouns, but certainly holiness is one of those nouns that is fundamental to our understanding of who God is. 1 John 2:2 says that “He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.” Romans 5:9 says that we are “justified by [Christ’s] blood” and then in Romans 5:10 that “we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son”. Our penalty for sin, the debt we owed God for being unholy, all of it was paid in full by the death of Jesus Christ. On the cross, Jesus proclaims “It is finished.” The price of our unholiness was taken care of once and for all, forever and ever.

The word holiday comes from the words “holy day”. And on Good Friday, because of the death of Christ on the Cross, we are made holy and blameless before the throne of God. Christ in a manger doesn’t make us holy. Christ alive in a tomb doesn’t make us holy. Christ on a cross makes us holy.

Without Good Friday, Easter has nothing to be victorious over. There is no victory over death without first that death. Without Good Friday, Christmas has no hope confirmed. What began in the manger, ended on the Cross.

Sunday is coming. And on that day we will celebrate the joy of the resurrection of our beloved Christ. But for one day, for one evening, let us not avoid thoughts of death and sorrow. Let us spend Good Friday, the most important holy day, reflecting on the great love of God poured out on a cross for us.