Some final personal spiritual reflections: Good Friday & Easter 2024

This year’s Good Friday and Easter have been extra meaningful to me, after my experiences on the work side of things in 2023. These are my personal spiritual reflections, and the final ones I will pen for the Holy Week.

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My first reflection is that Jesus really understood what I went through because He went through a million times worse. He was betrayed by Judas and denied by Peter, both friends of several years, and the greatest horror, he was abandoned by God with whom he had been in a loving relationship since creation. In my case, the feelings of being let down were more subjective, and I had agency in what happened. But Jesus was without sin. He was “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief …” (Isaiah 53:1). He was Emmanuel – God with us.

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My second reflection is that Jesus underwent all the pain, shame, humiliation and death voluntarily, which is such an amazing testament to how high, how wide and how deep His love is for me and for all mankind (Eph 3:18). No one took His life, he said, He laid it down of his own accord. (John 10:18). Whatever of this I had gone through was a small drop in the ocean compared to His pain, and it wasn’t of my choosing. Jesus chose to go through something a million times worse – for me.

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My third reflection is the depth of this divine love that forgives so freely, and how it behooves me to get rid of any last weeds of unforgiveness in my heart. The readiness and speed of Jesus’ forgiveness - even while being executed He forgave (“Father forgive them, they know not what they do”, Luke 23:34), and upon His resurrection He sent only love and hope to all His disciples. He even had a special mention for Peter in the message he had asked the women at the tomb to pass on. (Mark 16:7) In the Easter sermon, the bishop said that Jesus gave “peace” to his disciplines following His resurrection, and when we “go in peace to love and serve the Lord” (Anglican dismissal), it means bringing that peace and love to all, including our “enemies”.

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My fourth reflection is that while all good things for Christians are blessings from God and of His favour, it is not true that bad things or human failure mean a withdrawal of God’s love and favour. Jesus lived the perfect life and yet suffered the worst human failure. Yet in God’s plan, Jesus was ultimately glorified. Jesus still trusted and loved God even when God (truly) abandoned Him on the cross as He took the judgement. Though He slay me, yet I will trust Him (Job 13:15) is the perfect obedience and trust in the character of God. The turnaround may be in this life, or it may not be.

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My fifth reflection is on the power of and sovereignty of God in the resurrection. God can do anything. And just as what I had gone through was a drop in the ocean compared to what Jesus went through (voluntarily), what God did in the resurrection was a million times more amazing that what He did for me with the company last year. Indeed, at least two persons have referred to the company’s proposed acquisition after a public wind-down as having been “resurrected”. I always said instinctively, but we weren’t dead yet. Beyond my pedantry, there is a greater truth. Which is that even if the company had been lost, I would never have “died” inside. While I am deeply thankful for the outcome, it’s not really that which sealed for me that new knowledge of the goodness and love of God I gained in 2023. Rather, it was the fact that He didn’t let me go to pieces even when there wasn’t any second life being contemplated and that He stayed by me in a time when I felt helpless. If there was any strength I had displayed, it all came from Him and the people He sent to me. He did not forsake me, and unlike the forsaken Jesus on Good Friday, I had family, friends, especially Christians sent by God, who came alongside. I was honoured and loved. All this was possible only because of what Jesus did choosing to be forsaken by God and man at the cross, without which there’s no relationship with God, there is no church and no fellow Christians, and no hope. Like King Hezekiah who was healed from His illness, I can also testify, that truly it was for my benefit that I was afflicted (Isaiah 38:17). Because without that experience, I would never have learned what it was like to truly trust God and experience His deepest love, comfort, faithfulness and power.

Commemorating resurrection and Easter reminds me of this, and it is well needed, because in my weakness, I do still have fears. Specifically, sometimes I fear a second company failure, and would I be able to survive that? Here, I need to receive from the risen Christ His gifts of faith that dispelled Thomas’ doubt, the intimacy of the Holy Spirit, the power over the worst thing that could ever happen – death, and His peace that transcends all understanding and permeates all circumstances, and the position of a royal child of God He had wrought for me, beloved, favoured, approved, enough, no matter what. Such is the power of the resurrection I need to tap into, day by day.

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“What, then, shall we say in response to these things??If God is for us,?who can be against us??He who did not spare his own Son,?but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?? Who will bring any charge?against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies.? Who then is the one who condemns??No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God?and is also interceding for us.? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ??Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?? As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;?we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

?No, in all these things we are more than conquerors?through him who loved us.? For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,?neither the present nor the future,?nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God?that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Paul’s letter to the Romans, 8:31-39)