Good Friday 2025: The Cross and A Course in Miracles

In the morning after prayer I go outside with my coffee. I greet the lilies springing up through crumbling soil. I bless the robins flying away. It’s Good Friday, and my heart is happy, my mind at range. Easter is near; the evidence is everywhere.

And yet.

Before we remember the grace of Easter, we must face the ruination of Golgotha. Before we participate in the joyful creativity of resurrection, we must recognize fully the brutality of crucifixion. This is the mandate of the Lenten journey – you have to face the whole of it.

Alone in the half-light of morning I open my free hand and imagine you taking it. We will do this together. There is no other way.

Good Friday has both a political and a personal dimension. The two can be distinguished, but they cannot be separated. When we face the cross, we are looking at something both within and without us. Our response touches and is touched by both.

The political dimension of Good Friday is that Jesus is executed by the State for nonviolently resisting its claim to sole authority and power. Jesus is saying, the earth and the fullness thereof belong to the Lord, and God wills that it be shared equally among all people, without exception. No more hunger, no more loneliness, no more war.

In reply, Rome says (all empires say), we are the Lord – or our Gods are the Lord, if you prefer a religious frame – and we are going to publicly execute you for even thinking otherwise.

It’s clear the early followers of Jesus understood that following him meant coming into conflict with a way of being in the world that is unjust, unloving and unkind, and nonviolently demonstrating – teaching and sharing – an alternative.

That is our work, too. The political dimension of the cross asks us what we want to be true of the world, and how we will work with others to make that truth manifest. Politics is about relationship, and all relationship is local and united.

The personal dimension of Good Friday is that we have to die to the separate – the egoic – self. As Saint Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

Obviously Paul is using metaphorical language. We are not called to strangle to death on a cross. Rather, we are called to no longer hold a private self at the center of our shared lives. An anxious self, a defensive self, a deceitful self . . . all these must be brought to the Place of the Skull and left there.

The cross symbolizes our willingness to be transformed so that we are no longer bound to and by the egoic self. We give it all up; we let is all go. The cross represents total surrender. It represents our total willingness to have nothing in our heart or mind – nothing in our living – that is not of God (e.g. T-1.II.3:11).

Jesus was not merely committed to a vision of personal happiness and peace. He wanted that for us, yes. That is our inheritance, yes. But he understood that in order to remember that, to manifest that, one has to radically rethink their relationship to the earth and to one another. And that radical revision of relationship – which is political – requires a personal transformation at scales we cannot manage single-handedly.

A lot of us in the ACIM community think that caring about politics – or economics or whatever – is to somehow violate the tenet that the world is not real. We worry that if we take sides then we’re stuck in illusions forever. But remember: the reason the world is not real is because it does not reflect the will of God (W-pI.166.2:2).

What would a world that does reflect God’s will look like? And how will we help create it?

The first question is political, the second is personal and neither can be answered apart from the other.

Before the illusion of the world and the separate self are undone our dreams of fear are changed to dreams of happiness (e.g..T-18.II.6:3). This is ACIM’s happy dream, and it happens to these bodies in this world. We learn there is no separation anywhere and it changes everything.

How holy is the smallest grain of sand, when it is recognized as being part of the completed picture of God’s Son . . . For the whole is in each one (T-28.IV.9:4,6).

Nor does the illusion of separation dissolve for us alone. Happy dreams take the form of our brother and sister’s “perfect health” and “perfect freedom from all forms of lack” and “safety from disaster of all kinds” (T-30.VIII.2:5). It doesn’t matter what we feel. If anyone is afraid or lonely, if anyone is hungry or in pain, then “we” are not happy.

Jesus is saying that we have to learn how to love our brothers and sisters in a way that is not of this world, that is often actively opposed by this world. The cross is not theoretical. It calls for – it accepts nothing less than – the total transformation of the individual and the world.

This work is not easy. I have not solved it in some way that you have not. Good Friday is about recognizing that we have failed in our function to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10). The evidence is all around us.

But failure is not the end.

Therefore, let us not deny this failure but accept it. Easter is coming – we know this – but today, let us rest together in the part of the journey that scares us, the part that we resist. And let us do it together. Together is “yes” to God because it refuses the lie of separation.

Is it dark? Yes. Getting darker? Also yes. But we know something the darkness doesn’t. Before this morning’s lilies and robins – before the horrors of Golgotha – there is this love and it does not die. Failure is not the end.

Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter