What's so Good about Good Friday?

Photo by Kaffeebart on Unsplash

We would rather look away from the suffering at the heart of this day. We would rather look away from anyone in pain. That’s all the more true when it comes to the shame and degradation we witness when we turn our eyes to the Cross.

The priest at a North Carolina Catholic church, on a Good Friday some years ago placed an array of Lenten crosses, draped all in black, out in front of his little church. 

Not long after, Father Ed received a call from the North Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce: “Look, Reverend,” the representative said, “we've been getting complaints about those crosses out in your churchyard. Now inside the church, who cares? But out front, where everybody can see them, they are offensive. The retired people here don't like them—find them depressing. The tourists won’t like it either. It will be bad for business. People come down here to get happy, not depressed.”

The Scriptures designated for Good Friday won’t let us off the hook, though. It’s takes grit to experience the cumulative effect of all of those chapters that recount Jesus’s last hours.

It’s not easy to watch the scenes there.

And so we might ask, “Why is this day called Good Friday?” Why not Bad Friday or Sad Friday?

For we see Jesus, kind healer, masterful teacher, loving prophet, a mother’s son, at the center of agitation and contempt. 

As Fleming Rutledge puts it, “For Jews and Gentiles alike in those days, a crucified person was as low and despised as it was possible to be.”

The whole process was excruciating not only because of the physical effects, but also the shaming, the emotional trauma. The cross didn’t just mean mind-exploding pain, crucifixion was blatantly public. The soldiers mocked him. The crowds heaped ridicule on him. Spat on him.

The agony was seemed perversely designed to deny and erase the humanity of the criminally accused.

The goal of crucifixion was to eradicate the person from memory. It was so repellent, that you would want never to think about the person again.

So it is that Isaiah the prophet, looking ahead, spoke of there being “Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected, and as one from whom other hide their faces.”

Even God seems for a time to have forsaken him. That prospect was behind Jesus’ agonized cry from the Cross.

No wonder we’d rather pass quickly over the sheer sadness. 

But it’s only as we look that the good in Good Friday emerges out of the scenes of suffering. For it is good, what transpires.

Yes, it’s possible to read this story as depressing.

Or as the most wildly promising thing in the world. It means something amazingly good because of the love it points to. Because of all it tells us about a God who is for us, not against us.

We’ve seen lots of suffering lately, haven’t we, between Covid and Ukraine and a divided country? We’d like to push it all out of mind.

But keep looking and we are moved to give the Good Friday scene even more loving attention.

For we watch, and realize Jesus did all that for us. At the cross we see God’s love writ large, a sacrificial love, willing to endure anything to grab our attention, willing to die to bridge the estrangement between us and God.

Jesus endured the worst to accomplish the best. He loves us this much.

It was hard. It is hard to take in.

But it is also hard to stay neutral when someone loves you enough to go to great lengths to help you. It’s hard to be casual when someone willingly gives their life for you. We now see that love offered to us. A suffering that bridges the chasms of distance and our indifference.

We let the life and death of Christ stir something deeper in us. We let it soak through our tough skin.

Good Friday’s message is sobering, even sad. But we keep looking. And because of God’s mercy in Christ, this can be a good Friday.