Well, I'm no expert, but I think the idea is that you're supposed to be sad and repentant on Good Friday that we've screwed up so badly to require this kind of intervention, and happy on Easter at the promise of resurrection for the rest of us, not just Jesus. I'm not sure you should interpret GF as the moment of redemption.

I'm sure I could procure a MUCH more thorough explanation of this from a certain friend of mine...

At the risk of being sacreligious (which never stopped me before)and apology in advance:

Some people call him Jesus, and some from Hispanic cultures call him "Hey-soos," and other the Son of God, and others "The Prince of Peace."

But if he arose by any other name, would he still smell as sweet?

Just wondering.

Happy Easter to all.

What you are not getting is that the *ressurection* is the joyful "key defining moment" that demonstrates the possibility of redemption and salvation. The cruicifiction is a necessary part of the journey, but not the joyful event.

As a secular equivalent, you might as well ask why America would be happy on V-J Day or V-E Day, but not equally joyful on Rememberance Day. After all, you could reason, without Pearl Harbor, we never would have joined the war to defeat Hitler. So shouldn't we celebrate the grisly deaths in Hawaii that dragged us into the war?

Well . . . no. We celebrate defeating Hitler, not the sad events that brought us in to the conflict. Likewise, we celebrate the ressurection of Jesus, and accept that his death was necessary to bring about that happy event.

If you want a more interesting puzzler (in my opinion), you could ask why Judas isn't a holy figure. After all, wasn't his betrayal a necessary step in the process? Didn't he make an ultimate sacrifice - betrayal, madness and suicide? Had he not betrayed Jesus, would we have no savior? Why is he vilified when Peter, who denies Jesus three times, is remembered so fondly? Couldn't Peter have stood by his Messiah?

Anyway, I'm getting off topic. The point is, the crucifixtion is not the key defining moment - the ressurection is. That is why Easter is bigger, better and more egg-y than Good Friday.

[written at the same time as Jimpy, but I'm not going to go back and cull the overlap]

You’ve got a lot going on there, Ennis, so I’ll try to take things one at a time. I’m no expert either, but I have given a decent amount of thought to some of the issues you raise. Conversely, I’m writing this with minimal

revision, so there are probably some cracks or illogical parts. Finally, I am to some extent speaking ex cathedra, as it were, so my explanations are not necessarily my beliefs.

“Christ died for your sins” right? He didn’t rise for your sins, did he?

Christ’s death and resurrection are kind of a package deal. He wasn’t (according to mainstream dogma) just a man, he was the Son of God, the deity immanent. If he had just died, he would have been simply a martyr, but since he was resurrected, he (essentially) proved out his divinity. Further, it’s not really the biological concept of death that&#

8217;s important, it’s the concept of sacrifice. Some liturgies I’ve heard or been a part of use terms of sacrifice, in fact, rather than plain old death.

The iconic image of Christianity is Christ on the cross, it’s a cross that’s on the walls of every church in America, not an empty cave, or a Christ ascendant.

Not entirely true. A lot of iconography does indeed depict Christ on the throne surrounded by the cherubim and seraphim, angels and archangels, or Christ walking on clouds or being carried by angels. First Presbyterian Church, on 5th Ave near Washington Square in Manhattan, for example. [See also Note about Practical Considerations.]

So if the moment of crucifixion is the key defining moment for a Christian, then why is Good Friday is an afterthought to Easter? Even for the Catholics, it’s Easter that’s the key holiday, that’s the big Mass, not Good Friday.

That’s just it -- it’s not “the moment of crucifixion” that is central to Easter, but rather the procession from one stage to the next, culminating in Easter Sunday, in the miracle of Resurrection. There are plenty of people for whom all of Holy Week is a pretty big deal. I’m not sure where you are looking, but every church I’ve ever gone to has had some service, no matter how small, on nearly every day of the week preceding Easter: Palm Sunday, a
Tenebrae service on Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday.
Imagine finding out, truly, for real, in a way that you couldn’t be convinced otherwise, that you were going to have a life beyond your wildest dreams of happiness. That’s what Easter is for many Christians, and why the Resurrection is their focal point. Many people don’t know that Easter is the first day of the Christian year.
Further, you may be looking at the telescope in reverse. Christianity is not just about worship of God, but also about fixing ourselves. So the important thing to a human is not so much that s/he is going to die but that s/he is going to live again. Consequently, the important exemplar there is the Resurrection. [See also note about practical considerations.]

I also don’t get why, if salvation is a joyful concept, Good Friday is not a joyful day. That’s easy, say you -- the crucifixion was a gruesome event. How can you be happy at the brutal death of the messiah? Well, say I, this is the long foretold sacrifice of the lamb, right? This is the moment of redemption. If Christianity is a religion that says that you shouldn’t be afraid of death, then why can’t you be happy on Good Friday? After all, this is the big G-D we’re talking about here ... omnipotent being and all, right?

I must say that this seems either to be bait or a little naive. While I consider myself to be unafraid of death, I (1) am not exactly risking my life daily as I sit in front of a computer terminal and (2) cried like a baby at my mother’s funeral and still find myself tearing up when the cues are right. Just because the dogma says that Christ gave us victory over death doesn’t mean that we all really feel that way. Since Christ was human, it’s fairly understandable that people would feel odd celebrating his death. However, there may be churches that have joyous services on Good Friday, just as many New Orleans funerals play happy jazz after a certain point.
Analogous: Watching Matewan made me feel horrible, though I strongly believe that the miners’ sacrifices (and even the sacrifices of the miners) were necessary to bring about something approaching justice for them. Shouldn’t have been necessary, but they probably were.

A Note About Practical Considerations
We’re all big kids here, so we should all know by now that Christianity, like all religions, has a lot in it that is not dictated by Truth, Consistency, or Historical Accuracy. So for example, much iconography deals with the crucifixion because that’s easier to encapsulate in an icon than a void is. How do you cast in bronze an empty tomb? How do you make a pin out of it so that your parishioners can wear it? More cynically, how do you take the position that your flock is sophisticated enough to grasp the nuances of the abstract when you’re pretty busy trying to keep them dumb enough to not know you’re growing fat off their tithes and sweat?

Why Easter is More Important than Good Friday
People have to work. The Bible says that God rested on the 7th day. So in the springtime, when there are crops to be put in the field and livestock to be pastured and clothes to be made and meal to be ground, you can’t always manage to take both days off. Maybe in the 1200s they did. Europeans were in many ways more observant then.
I think it was as recently as the early 20th century that Italy realized that there were so many religious feasts that people weren’t getting any work done. Something near 200 a year, IIRC. (Though not all in one place.) So they had to cut some out. I would speculate that something similar happened over time with Good Friday vs. Easter.

Further reading:
A Mennonite discourse on the history of the Christian Calendar
A sample calendar from Trinity Episcopal Church in Cheneyville (sorry), LA

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that Christianity covers a pretty big quilt. None of my answers respond for all Christendom, since Catholicism in Costa Rica is pretty different from Catholicism in the Polish part of Chicago is different from a storefront church in New Haven is pretty different from a cathedral in Russia is different from a furtive service in the back room of a store in central China. One of the strongest survival traits of Christianity has been its mutability, so maybe you need to refine your question to one of theory or one of practice.

Yesterday, we passed a pro-lifer's car festooned with bumper stickers, one of which asked: "WHAT IF MARY HAD HAD AN ABORTION?" Which caused me to ask: what if she had had an abortion? Since Jesus was the son of G_d from the moment of conception, wouldn't he have presumably risen from the dead as a fetus? Would he still have been the Messiah?

Sorry for the weird question -- we can add it to Jim's Easter Puzzlers.

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