Remember that Christianity is Dangerous this Good Friday
Meandering reflections on Good Friday, the resurrection of Lazarus, the disappearance of moral knowledge, and the struggles of church planting in Singapore
Good Friday continues to be the most poignant Christian holiday of the year for me. (I’ve previously posted reflections on it in 2014 and 2017.) As a holiday, it really stands out — which other religion, or movement of people more generally, not only remembers but celebrates the death of its founder? As Americans, it would be like replacing President’s Day, which falls between President Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays, with a celebration of April 15th, 1865, the day Lincoln was assassinated. That just wouldn’t make any sense.
And yet, here we are as Christians, doing just that. In Singapore, like much of Europe, Good Friday is even a public holiday. We even gather for morning services like usual on Sundays, just like any other weekend.
That familiarity makes it all the more important to remember what is different about Good Friday, about the crucifixion of Jesus, that we celebrate. Having experienced it a couple of times by now, it can become easy to fall into “Sunday morning mode” on Good Friday, feeling like we’re just getting a second dose of the same general Christian encouragement we get every week.
This year, the way our church fought against that was by blocking out as much of the light as possible and lining the walls with artificial candles. The sunlight was still blindingly bright in the infant care room where I took Esther in the middle, but while in the ballroom and foyer, the effect was pretty effective at establishing a different mood.
For the last couple months including on Good Friday, our church has been going through a series called Encounters with Jesus, where we look at the archetypes of different types of people Jesus interacts with in the gospels, both to learn from his example and to see how we ourselves interact with Jesus.
The week that stuck with me the most was a couple of weeks ago, when we dove deep into Jesus’s most prominent miracle, raising Lazarus from the dead, in the first half of John 11. The main focus of the sermon and Bible study, which I facilitated for two different groups (one of youth and one of adults), was the different and striking ways Jesus interacted with the two sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha.
With Martha, who seemed to be struggling most with the big picture, Jesus raised her hopes of the eventual new creation. But with Mary, who was deep in the process of mourning, Jesus simply wept (famously, the shortest verse in the Bible, as the youths were quick to recount). It was striking both how Jesus sympathized with Mary even knowing full well that he would raise Lazarus from the dead minutes later, and how differently he reacted to each sister despite the exact same words coming out of their mouths.
As a church with a ton of Mary’s, but which everyone assumes to be all Martha’s, I think it was particularly helpful to reflect on that focus of the passage personally, and spent most of both Bible studies doing so. But there’s also a second undercurrent throughout the chapter which makes this passage particularly compelling to have studied in the lead-up to Holy Week.
In a halting exchange at the beginning of John 11, it becomes clear that the disciples don’t want to go to Bethany, where Lazarus was. It was just a couple miles outside of Jerusalem, and the last time they got that close, Jesus had almost been stoned (verse 6). They ultimately embark on the trek grimly, with Thomas forebodingly rousing his fellow disciples to join Jesus so they can “die together.” It’s a mood similar to that of Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings when they realize they won’t have enough water, let alone food, for the return journey from Mordor, yet in the disciples’ case without even understanding the purpose.
Sure enough, immediately after Jesus raised Lazarus, some Jews reported the miracle to the religious leaders in Jerusalem. The leaders aren’t thrilled, and they weren’t even thinking about Jesus’s claim to divinity. Rather, they were primarily worried about the disruptive effects his popularity will have on the fragile status quo under Roman rule.
As the gospels continually make clear, Jesus anticipated all of this in advance. He knew exactly what he was doing by going to Bethany and by raising Lazarus from the dead. Like the showdowns between YHWH and pagan gods in the Old Testament — most prominently the plagues of Exodus and the carefully controlled experiment of 1 Kings 18 — Jesus was coming face-to-face with Death and revealing his power over it, thereby validating in the here and now the end times picture of eternal life he painted to Martha just beforehand (verses 25-26).
But that victory would not come without a cost. Like the Balrog whipping Gandalf down with him into the abyss of Khazad-dûm, Death would exact its revenge on Jesus mere days later. Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, which we remember on Palm Sunday just a week before Easter, is in John 12, the very next chapter.
Putting this all together, then Jesus laid down his life so that Lazarus could live. Like how Lazarus’s resurrection points to our eventual resurrection in the new heavens and new earth, Jesus’s direct sacrifice for Lazarus also paints a vivid picture of how his substitutionary death atones for our sins.
This brings us back to Jesus’s disciples’ fear of going anywhere near Jerusalem. That fear was ultimately well-founded! Jesus would indeed die on this journey.
Jesus didn’t face down his eventual brutal death on the cross by trusting in his own strength, the numbers of his followers, or the legions of angels he could call down at any moment. Lazarus’s resurrection would actually not quite be his last miracle before the cross. Rather, he would choose to heal the ear of the guard who came to arrest him, which Peter chopped off in what he thought would be his heroic last stand.
It’s in this context that Peter’s subsequent three denials of Jesus actually make even more sense.1 On edge from the danger that the disciples knew they were getting themselves into, Peter had thought this would be his moment he would be called on to fight to defend his Lord. He was not at all expecting Jesus to surrender to the temple guards willingly, let alone rebuke him and even heal the guard who clearly meant him harm.
Peter, then, was not simply afraid and evasive when questioned by onlookers about his allegiance to Jesus later that night. He thought of himself as a disciple of Jesus the miracle worker, not this humiliated and flogged convict he now saw at a distance. His denial of “I do not know the man” rang oddly true in that moment. Peter, probably along with many of the other disciples, was in the process of deconstructing the faith he had held just hours before.
Perhaps this is why, on the other side of the resurrection, Jesus pairs Peter’s three denials with a three-fold repetition of the question, “Do you love me?” followed by the admonition to “feed my sheep.” Peter had loved a Jesus who was powerful — did he also love the Jesus who was humiliatingly crucified? He had always been willing to fight for Jesus — but was he willing to gently lead Jesus’s followers like a shepherd?
Just as Jesus had no purpose for a brave Gryffindor like Peter who would fight for him, he also would have had no purpose for a clever Ravenclaw PR team of disciples who would try to spin his message to be more palatable to everyone involved:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10:34–39, ESV)
Jesus’s defenses before the religious leaders and Pilate on the night before he was crucified are striking for how much he doesn’t say. We don’t see the eloquent teacher of the Sermon on the Mount in that moment, talking his way out of trouble. Instead, we see Jesus deliberately holding his tongue, no more eager to call on his copious intellect than he did on the legions of angels.
That’s a difficult message for, frankly, people like myself, what with my generally centrist politics, propensity to rush towards playing a mediating role in conflict, and desire to portray my faith to a skeptical world in a winsome fashion. Jesus doesn’t face down his eventual death with confidence in his ability to come across as reasonable to everyone involved. He knows his message will be divisive, and doesn’t seek to tone it down to get along.
Sometimes this very desire to be seen as reasonable is ultimately for the detriment of everyone. I’m currently reading Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics in chunks during my daily quiet time. I just finished the second chapter, where Wear recounts and expands upon Dallas Willard’s concept of the “disappearance of moral knowledge.”
A very brief summary: Until the last century, when people reasoned about public matters, they commonly treated moral claims — of what is most right or just, for instance — as having actual truth values that could be ascertained, “knowledge” in other words. But through a series of factors, that language has by now been replaced almost entirely with a relativistic conception of morality.
(I say “almost entirely” because there seem to me to be elements of a revitalization of this concept in the likes of Effective Altruism, a rationalist project that I very much support despite its unfortunate association these days with the fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. Where the rationalists attempted to apply rigorous thinking to the knowledge of reality, as effective altruists attempt to do so for morality. But that’s a subject for another discussion.)
In the book, Wear recounts how in the 1960 US presidential election, John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic major-party candidate for president, sought to reassure a skeptical and somewhat anti-Catholic public that he would not be taking orders from the Pope as president. Going beyond that, though, he painted his faith as a private matter, only relevant to his personal conduct and not to how he would govern as president.
Kennedy’s portrayal of his faith is obviously not singularly responsible for the disappearance of moral knowledge, but it’s illustrative of how that took place. Kennedy wanted his faith to appear palatable to the voting public for the sake his own personal political ambition, so he watered it down and portrayed it as a private matter.
In the same way, Christians like myself who attempt to be winsome can confuse ends with means and ultimately end up denying Christ no less than Peter did. I even found myself trying to backpedal from asking for time off from my boss today, eagerly fixing a couple bugs in my code before going for the service. How many of us approach church as just something we do on Sundays, so we can feel good that it won’t interfere with our work and advancing in our career?
In the political realm, it’s important to recognize that this accommodating spirit can either look like liberal Christians denying Jesus’s teaching on sexual immorality or conservative Christians denying Jesus’s teaching on caring for the poor, because both examples stem from a desire to make Christianity reasonable within their own tribe. Both sides like to point the finger at the other as accommodating to the broader culture, but both are guilty of it.
Just as importantly, though, this type of denial is not the domain of partisans alone. It can also look like centrists carefully crafting compromises to try to maintain a fragile political order. After all, killing Jesus was the one thing that brought the Pharisees and Sadducees, the left and right of that day, together.
Jesus never promised us that following him would be safe.
But what does that look like today? Christians often think towards scenarios like the Columbine school shooter asking who in the room is a Christian. Let me give an example which I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about recently with my own church.
As a church, we’ve grown tremendously, particularly over the pandemic, and have been slow to keep up with the implications. We’ll probably be at around 2000 congregants this Easter, but in Singapore, that doesn’t qualify you as a “megachurch,” colloquially speaking.
Why do churches in Singapore tend to be so large? At first, I was drawn to mechanical explanations — the population density paired with a top-notch transit system mean that churches, particularly in the downtown core, can draw from the entire island. But then I learned more about my church’s sincere desire to plant more churches, a desire that frankly far exceeds how much church planting we’ve actually been able to do. And I’ve learned that we aren’t alone — other churches in Singapore have also struggled and even given up on the idea.
After years of preparation, we recently planted out a small Mandarin-speaking congregation and a much larger English-speaking church which for nearly two years went by the name of “English Church Plant” before finally deciding on an actual name of Grace Community last month. Despite the subpar branding, ECP grew tremendously, to the point where they are already facing questions of whether they should expand to multiple services or plant out themselves.
For the first year, though, the perennial prayer request for ECP was that they would find a venue at which to gather on Sunday mornings. Despite the robust attendance and willing and capable leadership (which I found even eerily too capable the first Sunday I visited), they just couldn’t find anywhere to settle down. They even shifted the region within the island they were targeting for this reason.
At first, I thought this problem was merely logistical and a matter of the staff putting in the research and scouting to find an appropriate space a densely-populated Singapore. Only when I dug in deeper did I discover that the true limitation is not the logistics, but the unreliability of government approval.
Given the natural space limitations, the Singaporean government carefully zones every plot of land on the island, and churches that want to license any space need not just approval from the owners of that space and an agreement on the price but approval from the government to use the space for religious purposes. And particularly since the pandemic, the government has been clamping down on such approvals, denying them more frequently to churches across the island, even to those who had all of their ducks in a row in their applications.
Why would they do that? Well, they never actually say. But I can guess that it stems from how much Singapore’s government values and tries to maintain the ethnic and cultural diversity of the population. They famously restrict sales of public housing on the basis of ethnicity to maintain approximately the same racial ratio across the island. Their approach seems likely to be similar on the religious axis — they want to be careful to maintain a proper balance of the spaces for each major religion present on the island: Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians.
It’s in that context that a growing church wanting to expand its footprint on the island is a threat. A church or movement of churches punching above the population average in terms of weekly attendance, with a steady stream of people coming to faith and getting baptized is going to inevitably stand out to a government focused on maintaining the perception of fairness. Approve too many of their change of use petitions, and citizens might perceive favoritism towards the evangelistic. Better to keep them bottled up in a small number of locations, none on a ground floor, with little to no visible external signage.
Of course, my natural inclination in that circumstance is to want to try to explain. We aren’t a threat! Maybe the problem is that we are too honest with them about our desire to see people come to know Jesus. Maybe if we more carefully craft our application, highlight the economic benefits we will bring to surrounding area, and reassure the government that we will only put up the necessary signage for people to know where to go, they might just let us gather there.
Some of those ideas might be well and good, but they’re not the way of the cross.
Instead, we should approach these things being willing to suffer. Willing to travel further out of our way to get to a less accessible location. Willing to reimagine some of what church looks like, if a single big gathering in a hotel ballroom is not feasible. Willing to intentionally send dedicated members and talented leaders to revitalize other churches. Willing to bear the burdens of the world for the sake of the world, just like Jesus.
I owe this provocative interpretation to Mike Cosper’s book, Land of My Sojourn, as Cosper recounted with Skye Jethani on the Holy Post podcast episode 507, “The Gift of Disillusionment”, starting at 1:26:49.
Brother Sam! Always enjoy reading your perspective and learning about the Singaporean church is always so interesting. I just came back from a morning sermon on Peter's denial and restoration as well but spent most of time contemplating the difference between confession and repentance.
Reading THIS: "Peter had loved a Jesus who was powerful — did he also love the Jesus who was humiliatingly crucified?" Hit hard. I often want MY Jesus. The Jesus I have known and makes me feel comfortable. Not Jesus, wholly Jesus. A perspective I hadn't heard before about disillusionment. I will have to listen to the Mike Cosper episode too!
I also relate heavily to the centrist tendencies and apolitically conflict-adverse nature too. I was just thinking this morning about how I would warn our youth group about being too "reasonable". I recall my frustrations about not meeting during Covid as the first time we explicitly chose safety over Christ. Yet I ended up following the majority too. My comfort idolatry is so prominent. Yet we in the American church have yet to see any true persecution. We should be wise and expect it and prepare. I pray we will be ready to suffer and carry the burden when the danger comes!
Hi Sam! Not sure if you remember me, but we met at an EA Fellowship in Singapore last year. I really enjoy your writing and it is, somehow, very timely. After Easter service, my church friends and I were discussing on where to draw the line when talking about our faith with nonbelievers and whether to be "less offensive" so that we can keep the friendship and thus, we can be a witness in their lives. Reading this: "Christians like myself who attempt to be winsome can confuse ends with means and ultimately end up denying Christ no less than Peter did," puts into perspective that sometimes, maybe the desire to be well-liked by others is really the basis of not wanting to be offensive. I pray for wisdom and courage that we can speak the truth in love. Cheers!