BY STEVE DUNN
Yesterday began the holiest season of the year for Christians. Beginning with Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the observance will take us to the Temple, where Jesus will confront the money changers and other religious leaders who had corrupted the faith of Abraham, Issac and Jacob. It will move into an Upper Room on the night in which Jesus was betrayed as he attempts to prepare his disciples for what will come next. We will enter the chambers of the Sanhedrin where Jesus would find himself in a kangaroo court at the hands of men who had long planned to kill him. We will pass through the palace of Pontius Pilate, the Roman ruler of Judea, who could find no fault with Jesus but would ultimate wash his hands of Jesus in an act of callous political expediency. We will climb the hill called Golgotha, the place of the skull, where Jesus would suffer the the cruelest of all deaths as he took on the sins of the world. We will find ourselves at an borrowed empty tomb where the bars of death were torn away once and for all in the Resurrection.
As popular and as warmly fuzzy as Christmas is to our culture and to many Christians, it is but a prelude to the event that would change history forever. An event now called Easter when a cross shaped hole was blasted through the stone that covered the door and changed the eternal destiny of all humanity both backwards into history and forward into the future. As it has been said, the nativity was not Jesus' destiny. The Cross was. And because of the Cross and the Resurrection, God declared in no uncertain words what a disciple named John would confess. "For God so loved the world, that h
He gave His one and only Son. That whoever would believe in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but through Him to save the world."
This truth, the central story line of Holy Week, is why Christian everywhere called Good Friday "good" and celebrate a day we call Easter.
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