Friday 6 April 2007

Today was Good Friday.

“Good Friday…what happened then?” I thought to myself this morning. I’ve been brought up in a largely secular environment so you will forgive my confusion about the Easter story. “Didn’t Jesus rise again on Easter Sunday? Hmm. That makes sense. So, since he rose again three days later, he must’ve been crucified on Good Friday.”

I kept on chewing my cereal.

“Hang on. This isn’t right. Jesus got brutally killed on Good Friday?”

So, I went to the Internet, and it confirmed my slightly bizarre suspicions. My brain kept whirring: “I bet he woke up on the Sunday, tracked down the disciples and said ‘Hey, guys, that was…uh…“Good” Friday, right? You do know that they nailed me to a fucking cross, don’t you? If that was Good Friday, what the Hell is Bad Friday like?’

“Hang on, that’s mildly amusing, perhaps I could make a ’blog entry out of it.

“No, don’t be ridiculous, that joke must be completely obvious. And not only that, it would imply a naïve lack of understanding of the Christian faith because, not only did I not know until the age of 21 that Good Friday was the day on which Jesus was crucified, I also appear to have missed the huge symbolism and the kind of ‘basis of the Christian faith’ bit about him removing all of mankind’s sin through his death blah blah blah. I will look like a moron, and an unoriginal moron to boot. I think I will instead not write a ’blog entry for today.”

But, desperate to update more than once a fortnight, and as is good practice when deploying your next highly original piece of observational humour on the Internet, I decided to Google it. I was rather surprised to find that nobody had made this observation in a particularly amusing way, at least before I got bored of sifting through the pages of search results. There’s the occasional pun, the odd observation on a message board, even some raving anti-Christian bloke explaining why it’s “Bad” Friday because all the lies and badness of the Jesus-faith were spawned on that evil day…but no-one covers the topic in an entertaining way at all.

So why has some nut not written a web page about it, then? Is Google a bad hackneyometer after all? There are all kinds of idiots with far too much time on their hands ’blogging away. Surely someone should have mentioned it? Or is it really a sparkling gem of little-noted wit?

My continued musing led me to investigate the etymology of this rather strange apparent contradiction. No-one really seemed to know. There was a bit of speculation that it was a mutation of “God Friday”, and a few people giving the primary school theology explanation I was so keen to point out that I knew with that faked train of thought just now. Wikipedia was the most entertaining (but I am always loath to trust its user-editable pages), informing me that it’s known elsewhere as “Great Friday”, “Long Friday” and “Big Friday”. No explanation for any of these was provided. I assume it was known as “Awesome Friday—In Your Face Jesus!!!” by other messiahs at the time. Little did they know that the whole martyr thing would be an absolute killer for the ratings in the long run (and ironic, given that Jesus was the killee).

Ha ha whatever your name is, you weren’t crucified and no-one’s heard of you. I can’t help but feel that the absence of a name only serves to make that remark more cutting.

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