Good Friday

Today is Good Friday--or so we call it. It is sometimes called Black Friday, because it was the anniversary of the death of Jesus. But more often, we call it Good Friday, because of the ultimate victory of Christ, which could not happen without it.


Every year at this time I struggle to explain the miracle of Good Friday. Every year I fail. The main reason, I guess is that when it comes down to it, I don't understand it myself. Oh, I can give you the theological meaning of the Cross. I know that Christ suffered and died for my sins. But that doesn't answer all the questions. Couldn't a God who is the creator not only of this world but of all possible worlds construct the moral universe in such a way that the death of Jesus would not be necessary? After all, He's the one who makes the rules. Surely he could have found a less bloody way to show us leniency?

But he didn't. He chose to make salvation available to us by becoming human and then dying at the hands of Roman torturers. Taking communion from silver trays in an air-conditioned church, presided over by serious looking men in robes does not adequately express the horror and wonder of what He did.

The cross is a shocking, shocking story--an offense to good people everywhere who think the world is good, just, and noble. Here was an innocent man nailed to boards and hanging by his wounds in the burning Middle Eastern sun. His government condemned him as a traitor. His religious leaders denounced him as a heretic. Even his friends ran from him as too dangerous to support. He received this treatment for telling the truth about Himself, gently and politely. For the crime loving truthfulness, he was beaten, mocked, stabbed, whipped, and left to die of exposure, blood loss, and pain.

Yet we call that day Good Friday.

Looking back through the Resurrection even, we see the meaning of it. But on that Black Friday, it made no sense at all. Why should a good man die for nothing? Didn't he deserve better? The peacemakers are always the ones who usually get assassinated. If it was God's will to take him early, then why couldn't he be assassinated like Lincoln or Caesar, quickly and suddenly, rather than having to endure the physical an psychological torture of one of the most humiliating deaths imaginable?

The senselessness of death was brought home to us this last week. My wife Joy works with preschool, visually impaired students. Last Friday on of her children--a three year old child-- suddenly died for unknown reasons. This was the first time one of her student had died. She went to the service, where the preacher spoke of him as an angel who showed Christ in his little face. He wasn't Christ, though. He was just an innocent kid who died too early and left behind a grieving family. There was nothing "good" about that death at all.

Life has many meaningless moments. Children die, the innocent suffer, evil people win battles, good people lose them. The same world that gives us sunsets and gentle breezes also gives us hurricanes and tsunamis. Whether we get flood or drought makes no sense, but depends on water temperature on the other side of he world. It has nothing to do with us. Try as we might, we cannot make sense out of why one person suffers and an other escapes. Mortality is the price we pay for being alive.

It would be nice if before death took us, Jesus would just come again and take us all to heaven. But for most of us, the path to paradise leads through the grave, like a thousand generations of ancestors before us. And we all live in this world of pain and suffering, looking up to God and crying out "Why?" To which God does not really give an answer--not that we could understand the answer if we knew it, anyway.

Since we are unable to comprehend the reasons for suffering, God gives us the next best thing. He gives us companionship. He did not exempt Himself, but went through the worst of it without flinching or complaint. He demonstrated that suffering does not have to lead to despair or hopelessness. It is possible to be faithful in the middle of torture and death and remain obedient to a greater and higher purpose. Suffering can be endured, even the loss of someone we love. We do not have to know the meaning of it. We only have to know that God knows the meaning of it all.

What makes Good Friday good is not what happened on that day, but what happened three days later, when Jesus rose from the dead. Even death is not permanent in the end, and God's goodness is vindicated. Where He went, we can go, too.

We can never look at God and say "You don't know how I feel." He knows exactly how we feel. He's been through it, too. He demonstrated that Black Friday can also be Good Friday in the end, when we keep believing in Him.