By Bishop Hwa Yung

The season of Lent, which climaxes with Good Friday and Easter, is just over. What is so special about it? I would like to reflect over three articles on God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit respectively. Hopefully, they will enable us to understand better, not only the meaning of Good Friday and Easter, but also the wonders of the gospel message we have in Christ. We begin with the Father.

Love – the object of our deepest yearnings
At the very heart of the nature of God Himself is love. ‘God is love’ (1 John 4: 8,16)! Moreover, our Lord Jesus also reminds that the greatest commandment is ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,’ and the second is ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (Mark 12: 30 & 31). Thus not only is God love himself, but our highest duty in life is to love Him and one another! This further points to something that lies at the very heart of life, that inside each of us is a deep yearning, a desperate human cry to be loved!

Unfortunately, the word ‘love’ is much misused and trivialised today, although in reality we need it far more than most realise. Around the 1920s, doctors in some hospitals in Europe and North America noted high mortality rates among orphaned or deserted babies, even after they had been given the best care and nutrition. Babies would just become listless, refuse food and then gradually die. But they also noted that such babies would sometimes respond to some specific individual nurse.

These babies, when given special attention and bodily contact by such a nurse, often survive. In one New York hospital, the mortality rate dropped from 35% to less than 10%. They could only conclude that many babies were dying of grief for their lost mothers, and that when love was received through a surrogate mother, they lived!

Although many are not consciously aware of how much we need to be loved, nevertheless we see this deep yearning for love again and again expressed in different ways in life. In the 1960s, The Beatles sang, ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ...’ Pop songs today beat a similar tune! And when many, not least the young, go sleeping around in a desperate (and often, aimless) search for companionship and fulfilment, they are crying out for the same. Similarly, when men and women, driven by deep-seated insecurities, chase frantically after beauty, money, success, sex, power, degrees, titles and the like, they are really doing so because, deep inside them, they are afraid that they will not be respected and loved. Just watch the advertisements and see how such fears are being exploited daily, if you want to understand this better!

But the truth is that many are seeking meaning, acceptance and love in the wrong places. They do not realise that what they yearn for is found partially at best in the world around us. Only in God can our deepest longings for love be met. The great St. Augustine, after many wild and wasted youthful years, summed this up eventually in the words: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you!’

The Message of Good Friday
What has all this to do with Lent, the time when we remember Christ’s suffering on the cross? The answer in short is that Good Friday is about God, knowing our condition and deep longings, who loves us with an immeasurable love. Taking the initiative, He actively seeks us by sending His Son to die to redeem us. ‘God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16).

The Bible, especially in Gen 3, tells us that when we disobeyed God, sin broke our relationship with Him. Herein lies the root of our spiritual problems. Cut off from the source of life, purpose and love, we lost our security in God. Together with this, guilt, shame and fear (Gen 3:7-10) came into human existence. All these have led to the disintegration and brokenness of the self found in each of us. Not only insecurity, but psychological disintegration of every kind ensued—emotional hurts, sense of rejection, loss of identity and sense of self-worth, and the like. But that is not all. A proper understanding of Gen 3 and other parts of the biblical message tells us that our broken relationship with God and with ourselves led further to our broken relationships with each other and with nature. In other words, sin lies at the root of our spiritual, psychological, social and ecological problems. All these need to be healed and made whole again, and that is what salvation is all about.

Good Friday is about God taking the initiative: God sent His Son (John 3:16)! Even in the story of the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:9), we find Him searching for a lost Adam: ‘Where are you?’ Perhaps it is in the Parable of the Waiting Father (Luke 15:11-31) that we sense the Father’s love most powerfully. The parable is often wrongly called the Parable of the Prodigal Son. But that is wrong of course, because the central character in the story is not the rascal who ultimately repented, but the Father who patiently waited for the son to come home! And though the son’s actions have been most offensive to the father, and indeed had shamed him and the whole family, nevertheless the father in his love was always waiting for the son to come home!

The message of Good Friday is that God can turn things round. Sinners can be forgiven—just like the Prodigal son! Our deep-seated insecurities can be removed by our relationship with God being restored through Christ’s death for us! Broken lives and relationships can be healed. As I write, I think of a friend who had lost a small fortune in gambling, as a non-Christian. The habit had enslaved him and his wife was on the verge of walking out on him. God stepped into his life, sorted him out at a rehabilitation centre for gamblers run by an AG church, and saved his marriage. Today he is happily serving God in a ministry with a church.

I think also of a Christian girl I first knew many years ago who could not get along with anyone who lives or works with her. She could even scold her own bishop! But God graciously stepped into her life and confronted her with her deep-seated brokenness. Her father had deserted her mother when she and her sister were still tiny tots. Her mother had slaved her guts out to bring both the girls up in the midst of extreme poverty. The girl herself was eaten up with anger and bitterness towards a father whom she had never even seen. But when she learnt to release forgiveness, she found healing and wholeness as the love of God flooded her heart.

Again, God’s love is the only real answer to the deep sense of insecurity in each of us. Earlier I noted that our separation from God because of sin has led to our loss of the fundamental source of security in life, just as (but much more than) when a baby is separated from his or her parents. This, together with inner wounds in our lives, results in us being deeply insecure and broken persons. So often in life we end up chasing vainly after things which we hope can give us a clear sense of security, identity and self-worth. But Good Friday is about God providing us with a totally different answer: To find our security and identity in Him!

When a person becomes a Christian, he or she returns home to a Waiting Father. This is the Father who sent His Son for our salvation. He is also the same Father who affirmed His Son at His baptism at Jordan with the words, ‘You are my Son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased’ (Mark 1:9-11). David McKenna, one time President of Asbury Theological Seminary, commented that it is like God saying to Jesus the Son: ‘I claim you. I love you. I am proud of you. Everyone needs to belong, to be loved, to be praised. When God says “I claim You,” Jesus finds the strength of His identity. When God says, “I am proud of You!” He has His sense of worth. This is the unshakable identity that Jesus took as His credentials into His public ministry. We too need these strengths of personhood. These are the relational credentials we must have if our ministry is to be effective: a sense of identity, of security, and a sense of self‑worth.’ Do we know such a Father too?

The message of Good Friday is that salvation can come into individuals, revival to churches, healing to communities and transformation to nations, because of what Jesus has done for us! That’s why the Cross—a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor 1:23)—always stands at the centre of the Christian faith! And all these springs from the heart of the Waiting Father, a Father who is determined to save, to love, to heal and to transform!

This is the glorious message of Good Friday! There is no other faith in the world which tells us of a Father like this! Nothing that we have done can make us deserve the love of God. It is given to us purely by grace, and entirely at the Father’s initiative.

Do you know this Waiting Father?
In the Parable of the Waiting Father (Luke 15:11-31), there are actually two sons. There is the prodigal son, the rascal who had insulted the Father and shamed the family, but who found forgiveness, grace, acceptance and love waiting for him when he finally got home. There is also another son, the older brother. He was the good boy in the family, the dutiful one who had served the Father faithfully. But he could not understand how the Father can accept and love the younger brother and even throw a party, a kenduri, for the whole town to celebrate when the rascal returns home!? Angrily he berated the Father: ‘All these years I have been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so that I could celebrate with my friends’ (v.29).

As we think of the wonder of the Christian message, we need to ponder this question. Which of the two sons in the parable do you really identify with? Do you see yourself as the rascal who comes home to a love that you never ever could deserve? Or, are you one of those who, like the big brother, has dutifully served God all your life, but has never really understood the heart of the Waiting Father? Indeed it is possible to have ‘stayed home’ all this while and yet never ever grasp the message of salvation and the gospel of grace!

May God grant you and I grace to know this Father who constantly waits for us to return, so that He can pour His love into our hearts to save, heal and transform!