The Christian World in Cultural and Political Crisis

Reflections on the tensions between Good Friday and Good News

Jesus was executed on the day Christians commemorate as Good Friday. The juxtaposition of evil pain and eternal good could not stand in greater contrast. It is no accident in history that an unjust State execution is the foreground for the redemptive acts of God. Wasn’t this always the case? The construct of the State is either premised on the doctrine of righteousness and justice or the premise of the State as a violent servant of alternative power to righteousness and justice. There is no middle ground - ever.

The fact that a brutal State execution of an innocent man becomes good news for the entire world could not be more nauseating for the distant, uninformed observer. Too many have died this way since the beginning of time and continue to die this way. The Christian world of 2025 finds itself in a critical Good Friday epoch where good men and women are deemed by the State to be its enemies, when they represent crass truth’s clash with crass nationalism, just another word for extreme Statehood.

Innocent people are executed for truth the State is unwilling to hear. But in this lament lies the brutal truth that God knew how this would go. Martyrdom is the mantle of messiahs.

And so Jesus accepts the mantle of martyrdom and the penalty of State execution. Innocence executed. Statehood satisfied and glorified. For the weak State, when choosing between truth and nationalism, will weakly fall to defend nationalism as patriotism, and trample over truth.

In the gory of the blood of Good Friday lies the DNA of the Good News of forgiveness. In his death, Jesus triumphs over State execution as an act of power and instead dethrones it with his utter willingness to die, willingness to forgive and willingness not to hate. State power failed to achieve the anguished resistance to death it so relishes; it failed to ignite a lingering hatred for the executed it so loves to see, and has to witness how the brutality of the execution, often used to celebrate State power and State violence, was filled with the opposite power of forgiveness.

So what do we do with such a radical God, who instead of sending us a grown man, sent us a baby, who, instead of sending us a theologian, sent us a carpenter, who, instead of sending us an aristocrat sent us an ordinary middle of the road kind of guy, who instead of sending us a conformist, sent us a left-of-everything type of thinker, who instead of sending us someone who can make everything work out, caused everything to collapse and eventually died himself?

The truth is that God is different to most of what He is made out to be. Utter different. He is different to our dominant cultural positioning. He is different to our esteemed political views. He is different to the class obsessions we so love.

Those who peddle a materialistic God, a "suited and kitted God", a "front row God", a "mineral water and "special chair" God, have never known God. God is meek and gentle. Most don't want a meek and gentle God. Our power-drunk, money-grabbing, title-obsessed political, cultural and religious leaders don't know this God. Surrounded by drop-outs, misfits, failures, the blind, the deaf, the broken, prostitutes, money launderers, corrupt, inquisitive government officials, low-income workers and more, he made them all know He was present in their realities. He did not condemn. He moved towards them. He celebrated them with his acts of dignity.

He did, however, call religious leaders "white painted gravestones" and told them their "father is the devil".

If we still think the cultural and political status quo is the "place to be", we've learnt nothing from this radical God. That's him. Meek. Gentle. Intelligent. Different. God.

The church should always live with an uneasy tension in relation to its cultural, economic, class and political location.

This Good Friday and Good News God showed us that a Samaritan man showed kindness to an injured man. He did not ask questions about the man's nationality. Or politics. He did not care about his social status. He saw an injured man and helped.

The man who showed compassion to the violently tortured Jewish Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, dragging the 41 kg patibulum he was to be executed on, or, if it was the complete cross, some 136 kg and who offered to carry it for Jesus, was a man called Simon, a Libyan man from the town of Cyrene in Libya, in Africa. Think about this: A Libyan man carried the cross of Jesus when he could no longer carry it himself. Someone entirely outside the sphere of Jesus culturally, politically and religiously, helped him to carry his cross.

Abraham, our patriarch, was from the town of Ur (today known as Tell el-Muqayyar) in Iraq. Think about that. In modern language, we would say: Our spiritual forefather Abraham was from Iraq.

The black Ethiopian eunuch, searching for understanding in what he was reading, was baptized by a Middle Eastern Jew. Think about that for a moment: A black Ethiopian castrated government official was reading Jewish literature and found it stirred his heart, and a Jewish Jesus follower helped him find the truth.

Cornelius, the Roman professional soldier, calls on Peter the Jew to explain God to him. Mary, the prostitute, touched Jesus. Lazarus was a homeless leper full of sores who found his way into Abraham's embrace. There are all these cross-overs that we have intentionally hidden and refused to talk about fully because we are so culturally and politically immersed in the status of the State. We won't risk taking on the mantle of martyrdom, for we fear the power - and persecution - of the State.

Christianity has always been about breaking barriers to engagement and enlightenment. Christianity is about cultures embracing every divide imaginable - economically, politically and socially. And it takes the risks on board implied in those cross-overs. That is what is birthed in the 72 hours between Good Friday and the Good News of Easter Sunday. Christianity is about destroying the fake class and culture systems. Christianity defies the risk-averse thinkers. And Christianity is against nationalism. The very nature of the final revelation is about every tribe, tongue and culture in one place, worshipping God. We have stripped down the true nature of the Good Friday and Good News revelation to become a plastic, pathetic cultural and political fit to please the agents of the State, not the Jesus of the Kingdom of God. It risks nothing —especially not culture and statehood.

Christianity has always been others-centred. It calls fakeness to account. Christianity is never about the blandness of similarity but about the richness of diversity.

The juxtaposition of Good Friday and Good News within 72 hours of each other refuses to sanitize God. It refuses to have sterile perfection as a benchmark for faith, an impotent cultural affiliation that strips the Gospel of its truth and power, or a powerful State that protects me against the very truth of the Good News and its full implications.

The current neo-Christianity has been used to inflict self-righteous images onto a broken world to further fuel our cultural, ideological and religious wars. We have developed a cultural self-righteousness that we think is a standard worthy of State endorsement and that the rest of the world should follow. Yet it's such a twisted, broken, cultural, self-glorifying righteousness that it’s the very thing that Jesus spoke against when he said, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees (the local cultural and political benchmarks), you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matt 5:20

The State is not the benchmark for Christian practice. The Truth is. No matter how uncomfortable that truth may be to my political, cultural or class identity

We have justified war with religious slogans and sermons. We have justified persecuting people with biblical verses and unjust laws. We have made our fake views and fears the new platforms of engagement and even hosted conferences to talk about it. We have shipped religious bankruptcy out to suffering people to make communities believe that gangsterism and drugs will be dealt a death blow if we have another religious campaign. The only death blow is to the pockets of the poor who gave their hard-earned money to another wealthy religious peddler with fake promises of a crime-free, drug-free society. We have said that if we only got rid of all the bad people, ‘we’ would be a better society. So we imprisoned them, deported them and executed them. While God was dying to forgive us and them, and make the two one.

When the Christian Scriptures reflect that "In this world, you will have many troubles", it uses the word "distress" for troubles. The troubled state of society is the normal state — a society in distress. In our religious orientations, we must deeply ponder how we navigate this. Distressed societies will become the norm in the future. We can only build so many walls and deport so many people and exclude so many people. Then it will catch up with us - or our children. Stop trying to make as if it doesn't exist. Or that we can get away from it. Good Friday and Good News co-exist. This is the essence of the Gospel. That Chaos and Truth co-exists. God moves towards the distress and the chaos. The institutional church often attempts to move from it, and insulate itself from it.

But we fail to see that we are the damaged ones. I am the damaged one. We have become used to quick quotes and short religious verses to "absolve our guilt, our trials and our conflicts" without reflecting on how we impact the context in which we find ourselves. Our bias. Our arrogance. Our self-absorption. Our stinginess in sharing ourselves with others. Our arrogance. Our monstrous egos are satisfied only when our judgement has slain the one who is different to us. Our fears drive us to become cut-out copies of some perfect ideal. Dress. Clothes. Lifestyle. There is no real deep substance to it. It's all a cut-out copy.

We became masters at managing ourselves, our time, our lives, our families, and our success, and we became masters at hiding our failure. We created lives without the chaos of Good Friday and only constructed our purpose around the Good News of Easter Sunday.

We crafted an image of ourselves so far removed from the truth of Good Friday that we even began to believe the self-righteous nonsense we told others about ourselves. We held our fake perfect lives up as an image for others—not to follow but to envy. And their envy filled us with importance. We lived off that envy like a starving wolf. And when we did not feel their envy, we dismissed them with disdain.

We went to perfect religious institutions, had the perfect friends, the perfect network, and had the right religious and political views. Still, all along, we were hiding the deepening corruption of character and culture. The stinking puss oozing from our broken lives became a toxic waste that contaminated the environments we entered. Instead of being light-bearers we filled spaces with fake, with fear and with vitriol. We failed to see the ever-lengthening logs in our own eyes.

We made ourselves great and others bad. We put ourselves first and others last. We made ourselves perfect and others imperfect. We made ourselves right and others wrong. We allowed the colour of our skin to determine our kin. We allowed the end to justify the means, no matter how evil and unbiblical those means. We made ourselves fear others and refused scripture to induce a "love conquers all fear" world. We allowed race to have a determining agency. We believed that when those we culturally and politically agreed with spoke about God, it was better than when those we culturally and politically disagreed with spoke about God. Cultural and political outsiders who spoke about God were only acceptable if they spoke in conformance with how our cultural and political context saw God.

Our often excuse for our self-righteous "blind spot" has morphed into gigantic cataracts - we are the generation who will be remembered as the ones who were called upon to see more than and to see beyond our blinkered prejudices - but like many, I - we chose the safety of the like-minded and the comfort of the self-righteous instead of the festival of the contrasting and the conflicting ideas - and we smothered the life out of the future and left behind a sanitized, sterile, infertile, bare, impotent, emaciated and emasculated world - and told our children that they would be ok. How wrong we were.

Today, our children are confronted with a world we did not prepare them for on every university campus: the world filled with the chaos of Good Friday. The world of the unresolved. The eternal Good Friday has dawned for them, and Good News is not any where near. The incomplete revolution. They are hopeless at navigating this chaos, but they recognize it and refuse to let it pass. They see it. They live it. And our neat lives can't handle this disruption. We were wrongly indoctrinated to see the current Christian world as orderly and godly and the world beyond the Christian curtain as chaotic and disorderly. We were made to believe that by emulating catholic and protestant cultural orderliness, we would be closer to God. We were indoctrinated to believe that cultural and political chaos was just all evil, instead of the possible birthing of Good News.

Yet it is within God's nature that He moves towards chaos and away from the sanitised. Abraham moved towards a chaotic new land, and Jesus moved into a chaotic piece of history. The disciples were advised to leave and not seek comfort. “In this world you will have many troubles.” Have we forgotten that?

We have to stare this chaos in the face. We must. Otherwise, fake and fear will displace the truth. We have become self-righteousness snobs (of whom I am the greatest) with a penchant for safety and safe self-congratulating dialogues and for judging others, and we know nothing of the Gospel of Chaos, of Good Friday. In the chaos of murder, death, lies, theft and sabotage, the biblical Jacob confesses, "God is in this place and I am not aware of it". Gen 28:16.

God is not scared of chaos. He moves towards it, uses it, redeems it, and then allows further chaos to shape it. It's the Deep Doctrine of Disruption. This is where sense-making with ourselves, with others, and with our children begins. God is in the chaos of Good Friday, and we are not aware of it. Even Jesus, for a moment, felt that God had abandoned him.

The Good News is that we have been given the power by Good Friday to overcome the State’s cultural and political demands and move way beyond its restrictions to find the other. To love the other. To forgive the other. See the other as more important than ourselves. Our own redemption is found in this Good News.

Armed with Good News and a broken chaos, we will move out to build a new ethic filled with truth and sense-making. Beyond the cultural limitations imposed on us and the enforced political views we are expected to hold. And within that chaos, the Doctrine of Disruption will either heal us or hurt us. But it will save us from the unbearable and unsustainable sanitized, impotent sterility of cultural and political self-righteousness. And then the deep, inspiring, and life-giving truths that give life and vitality will slowly begin to flow through our veins, for it will be in us - deep within us. And we will not judge each other - not by what we wear, believe, eat or say. All around us will be the light. For the light will be within in. Not in the State. Not in law. But in us. And the darkness of chaos will no longer be feared. For the light within us will be brighter than the darkness. And the cause will be greater than the chaos. And fake and fear will be replaced with faith and fraternity.

While the State may relish in inflicting endless Good Fridays on the innocent, it cannot do so forever. For in this lament lay this perspicacious truth: God knows how this will end.

That is the Good News at the end of Good Friday.