Dai­ly Reflec­tion
Sep­tem­ber 13, 2013

Today, in case you had­n’t noticed, is Fri­day the 13^th, in the year 2013 no less. For those of you who suf­fer from frig­ga­triskaideka­pho­bia (fear of Fri­day the 13^th), you’re not out of the woods yet, we have anoth­er one com­ing in Decem­ber. In research­ing it, I found that a sur­pris­ing num­ber of peo­ple have a real fear of Fri­day the 13^th, report­ed­ly about 20 mil­lion in the Unit­ed States alone. Actu­al­ly, as it turns out, Fri­day the 13^th days turn out to be gen­er­al­ly safer than oth­er days, prob­a­bly because peo­ple are more careful.

The super­sti­tion is appar­ent­ly of fair­ly recent ori­gin; men­tions of it appear­ing only around 1900 or so. It’s also not uni­ver­sal. In some cul­tures Tues­day the 13^th is con­sid­ered unlucky. In some oth­er cul­tures, the num­ber 17 is con­sid­ered unlucky.

Fear of 13 seems to have a par­tic­u­lar­ly pow­er­ful hold in the U.S., how­ev­er. Those of us who live in the Unit­ed States have prob­a­bly noticed that in most tall build­ings the ele­va­tor skips from 12 to 14, as if there were no 13^th floor.

It’s sil­ly, real­ly, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you learned the same account of the ori­gin of the super­sti­tion that I did, which is that Jesus was cru­ci­fied on a Fri­day and that there were 13 in atten­dance at the Last Sup­per. It seems to me to be among most bizarre of mis­un­der­stand­ings of Chris­tian­i­ty to asso­ciate this with bad luck. We call it “Good Fri­day” not “Bad Friday.”

True enough, Jesus under­went the ulti­mate test and sac­ri­fice for us on a Fri­day, but he did it to redeem us — not so that we’d be look­ing out for black cats, avoid­ing walk­ing under lad­ders and try­ing to keep from break­ing mir­rors. Paul has it exact­ly right in the first read­ing. He once was a blas­phe­mer, per­se­cu­tor and arro­gant, only to have his life turned around by his devo­tion to Christ.

So here’s to the luck­i­est day of the year. The one that saved our souls.