Thank God it's Good Friday

Enough politics already! (Well, at least enough for now.)

As you know, today is Good Friday. That deliberately ironic phrase is understood and celebrated by Christians around the world. If you don't understand it, I beg you to investigate. You'll be richly, perhaps even eternally, rewarded. Among the many good places to start is with a short reflection on the day's meaning and more by Quin Hillyer over at The American Spectator.

While I can't add much to Hillyer's piece, I would like nevertheless to pause and probe the meaning of the day from a different angle.

I am a big fan of the work of the writer Cormac McCarthy. While you may not be familiar with either him or his work, three of his novels have been made into motion pictures: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and, most recently, The Road. Heard of any of them? The last film was adapted from the short novel of the same name that earned for McCarthy the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. But of the three movies, the second, No Country for Old Men is undoubtedly the most famous as it won for its directors, the Coen brothers of Fargo fame, the Academy Award for Best Picture, also in 2007.

McCarthy's novels are uniformly dark, foreboding, and deeply serious. Whether you like them or not, enjoy his style or not, if you read them you will be forced to deal with profound questions of good and evil, life and death, etc. No Country for Old Men is no different in that respect. But as well-received by the critics as the film adaptation was, if you've read the novel, you were likely to have been somewhat disappointed. (Isn't that almost always the case?)

Nevertheless, the movie does manage to capture one scene from the book very well. In that scene the very evil protagonist is about to kill another of the story's significant characters. It's all very slowly, very deliberately paced. The sure murder looming, they sit across from one another and engage in what for you the viewer or the reader is a very uncomfortable conversation. At one point, just before the terrible deed is done, the assassin asks his victim this question: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"

"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Can you hear those at the foot of the cross, followers and non-followers alike, asking this very same question of the dead figure before them? The former with profound disappointment, the latter with contempt. Was your suffering worth this? Is any suffering worth this?

The silent Christ answered on Sunday morning.