It’sssssssssssss Friday! But it’s not just any Friday.

It’s Skip Day at Boise Bible College.

All colleges have their quirky little traditions which hearken back to days gone by. One of ours is giving our graduating seniors the power to unleash a barrel of wrench-wielding monkeys upon the machinery of BBC’s daily operations by canceling classes and replacing them with other activities. Part of Skip Day is a breakfast with the faculty and the graduating seniors, where the yearlong process of “releasing” our graduates into the world reaches a penultimate step: Redefining our relationship from teachers-and-students to peers in ministry.

All that to say this: Just prior to our closing prayer President Stine, noting that Skip Day this year coincides with Good Friday, turned what I thought was a really nice phrase. “Jesus didn’t skip this day.” And a good thing us for that he didn’t.

We live in a beautiful world, but no matter how much we admire it this beautiful world is broken, red in tooth and claw, slowly losing heat and energy and cohesion, and sooner or later it will kill us all. Humanity has its shining moments, but one walk down the wrong street inhabited by a fellow human of selfish motives and unrestrained impulses will mean you never see another shining moment again. Even the best people are terminally broken; with one notable exception every man or woman ever born will, given enough time, violate his or her highest ideals when the risk/reward ratio makes the temptation irresistible. Every saint, being at the core a sinner, has skeletons dancing in the coat closet.

And because we’re a broken race living in a broken world, Jesus– the one perfect man, God in human flesh–did what he didn’t have to do but what, ultimately, he alone could do: He was broken to fix everything.

Nothing about it was just; it is an outrage for the innocent to be punished for crimes not their own. And nothing about it was pretty; in terms of physical brutality, it is hard to suffer more than Jesus did over the course of those several hours (including, but hardly limited to, the final six on the cross). Actually, the physical pain was nothing compared to the agony of his momentary relational separation from the Father, something the Son had never experienced in his eternal existence, as a consequence of accepting the punishment for all the sins of all humanity for all time. No person this side of Hell has ever experienced the soul-crushing depths of such loneliness and abandonment. But Jesus did, and he did it for this reason: So that no child of God who returns to his or her Creator ever will.

The human heart is moved by acts of self-sacrifice. Think of any movie which has moved you to the point of tears. Gandalf holding the bridge against the Balrog so Frodo and the Fellowship could escape the mines. Thor casting his life before Loki’s Destroyer to save a town full of strangers. Spock (and, more recently, Captain Kirk) saving the Enterprise’s crew even though fixing the ship’s engine meant dying of radiation poisoning. Anna, forsaking the kiss from Kristoff she thinks will save her, stepping in front of Hans’s sword to save Elsa instead. There’s a reason why Hollywood keeps coming back to this particular trope, why George Clooney sacrifices himself to save Sandra Bullock, why Jack sacrifices himself to save Rose, why Dumbledore sacrifices himself to save Harry. It’s because the power and nobility of self-sacrifice has been hard-wired by its Inventor into our DNA. If we are true to ourselves, Christ’s self-sacrifice brings us home to our Creator.

Really, if you think about it, that little fingerprint of God on our soul makes the first Good Friday the Best Friday ever.

rk