How Long Will The Stock Market Remain Closed on Good Friday?

It's Holy Thursday. The markets have wound down for the week. The stock market will be closed on Good Friday. It is every year. Isn't that amazing? How did that happen? 

While you can look up the history of it - and it seems to have begun in 1864 - here are some thoughts about this remarkable fact. Agree or disagree, at least we're not getting bogged down in the ongoing chaos that seems to continue to grow by the day in our markets, politics and our economy. 

So here goes.

It happened because once upon a a time people believed in God. And in this country, a vast majority of people who believed in God were Christian. It wasn't a matter of imposing their views on anyone. It was simply logical to them, given what Good Friday commemorates. 

We won't spend time explaining what Good Friday commemorates. You should know this already. So it should now be obvious how and why Good Friday will find the stock market closed.

Of course, it's still puzzling why it remains closed these days. We're long past the ages upon ages where people believed in God. Sure, there were always atheists. But not so many. And sure some folks weren't as devote as others. But it was pretty common that people practice their religion, both Catholic and Protestant (and let's not forget the Orthodox). Heck, even Jews practiced their religion in greater numbers though, of course, they wouldn't be touting a day off on Good Friday. Still, I don't remember any of my Jewish friends expressing dismay or opposition to closed market on Good Friday.

But not only did people observe their religious practices, they lived according to the beliefs of their religion - or at least they were expected to and expected others to. When they didn't, they knew they had sinned. Yes, the awareness of sin and the shame of committing sin was present and accounted for.

The deterioration of religious beliefs and the rejection of anything having to do with religion in the public discourse was a relentless process that extended over many years. (Some trace it to the 18th century Enlightenment.) But its incremental settling into our minds and hearts ramped up a bit in recent years. You could make the argument that as government has grown, beginning with a vengeance in the 20th century, so too has the thorough secularization of our society. 

Look back and watch as the federal government mushroomed as the 20th century marched on. As it did, folks were less and less concerned with following the Ten Commandments and avoiding sin, and more concerned with power and its handmaiden - money.

Not that these two weren't always the object of affection for many folks ever since Adam and Eve decided to ignore God's commandment not to eat that fruit, but there was - at least it seems there was - always a core of folks who understood that something greater not only existed, but deserved fist dibs in guiding our thoughts, words, and deeds. 

Why bring this up now, on Holy Thursday. Simply because it is Holy Thursday in Holy Week. And Holy Thursday remains a big deal if one believes in God, more specifically that Jesus Christ, fully a man, was as well God.

While Protestants (at least some) observe Holy Thursday, it's the Catholic (and the Eastern Orthodox to be fair) who get the profound meaning of this day. Jesus sat with His disciples and transformed the bread and wine of the supper table into His Body and Blood - the day before He would offer His actual Body and Blood to His Father in reparation for the sins of His creatures - us - so that we could have a shot at salvation, of life everlasting in the eternal happy state that is Heaven. 

Someone has to make reparation for what Adam and Eve did all those centuries before. Jesus was the One who did. And He did so in the form of the Sacrifice of His Body and Blood - His suffering and death on the Cross.

So Holy Thursday brings us to Good Friday, when that suffering and death took place. 

And lest we reduce what happened on Good Friday to mere words or historical fact, consider these words:

“The pain suffered by our Lord,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, “was the greatest pain possible in this life.” Or these words of lesser-known Fr. Walter Farrell, who wrote: “Christ allowed His human nature to experience the length and the breadth and the depth of human suffering. Because He suffered to atone for the sins of all men, He allowed himself to endure the fullness of human pain.”

How about these more specific and thorough words from the great theological and spiritual writer, Father Edward Leen: Father Edward Leen explains: “The sufferings of Christ, intense in themselves, were inconceivably bitter because of the extreme sensitiveness of Him Who suffered. The exquisite sensibility of His Sacred Body added a peculiar intensity to the sufferings of the Savior. The finest and most delicately balanced nature that we could imagine would be blunt of perception compared with the Christ. His body was fashioned by the hands of the Holy Spirit Himself to be the matter of the Supreme Sacrifice. It can be said that the body of Christ was made for suffering because expressly fashioned for sacrifice. ‘Sacrifice and oblation thou wouldst not, but a body thou hast fitted to me. Holocausts for sin did not please Thee. Then said I, behold I come.’ (Heb. 10:5-7) When one thinks of the thoroughness of the divine workmanship, awful in the extreme must have been the agonies experienced by Him Who was fashioned by God for the endurance of pain.”

See why the markets are closed on Good Friday?

As for how long they remain closed in our thoroughly secularized society, it's anybody's guess. It's hard to see that happening, given the fact that there remain a significant contingent of believers who practice their religion even if they accept the swath of secularization that has elbowed God's Law into a secondary role in our lives. But you never know. Let the trend continue long enough, and anything's possible.

For now, though, things remain as they have been throughout our nation's history - at least as far back as 1864.

Well, that's it for now. Holy Week continues into Good Friday, then Holy Saturday. Then, of course, the day that Christ overcame death itself: Easter Sunday.

A blessed few days to you all!