Good Friday 94

Many people are talking about the Oscar winning movie “Schindler’s List”. It’s the story of what life was like in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Let me tell you about an incident that happened there.

The year was 1941. The place: Auschwitz, Poland. The Nazis had built a huge concentration camp there, and they ruled it with a grip of death.

They had a standing rule that if any prisoner escaped from Auschwitz, ten innocent prisoners would be executed as punishment.

One warm July afternoon, the commandant entered the compound and announced that recent rumors were confirmed. A prisoner had escaped. He then read off the names of ten men chosen at random. These men would be locked into special hunger cells until they died of starvation.

One of the ten prisoners condemned to die was a young Polish man in his twenties. As he heard his name read, he cried out, “But I have a wife and children.”

Just then, another man stepped forward and said quietly, “I will take his place.” That man was led with the other nine condemned prisoners into the hunger cells.

For the next two weeks they suffered the agony of starvation as their already malnourished bodies wasted away. Finally, the S.S. doctors gave the ten men fatal injections. Prisoner 16670 died on August 14, 1941. His name was Maximilian Kolbe. He was a Catholic priest.

The young prisoner for whom that priest died somehow managed to survive four more horrifying years in Auschwitz. He was liberated at the end of the war by the Allied forces.

Miraculously, he was reunited with his wife and family. They still live in Poland. And to this very day, every August 14, this man goes to a quiet spot in the woods near Auschwitz. He spends the day in quiet reflection, thinking about what it means for one man to give up his life for another.

For that Polish prisoner, that day in the summer of 1941 when a substitute took his place, was a terrifying day. But, for him at least, it was also a good day. For it was a day that, although he couldn’t know it at the time, he was given the gift of life.

Such is Good Friday. Although it was a terrible day in so many respects, a day when evil ran rampant, it was also a good day. For it was on Good Friday that Jesus Christ died as our substitute. It was on Good Friday that he took upon himself the penalty for your sins and mine, so that we might have life.

Romans 5:7-8 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Because of our sin, we stood condemned to die. But Jesus stepped forward and said “I will take your place.” Will you let him take your place?