Good Friday

Good Friday was the day when life was raw,
quivering, terrifying:
A day of numbed emotions,
a day of blunt nails
and splintered wood,
of bruised flesh and red blood.
The day when hopes were crushed
and the price of freedom seemed too high.
What we contemplate this day is beyond words,
and beyond understanding.
We pray for the strength to stand
with Christ today,
in the midst of the horrors of betrayal and death.

Good Friday – what does it mean? How is it good when it tells the story of a terrifying and tragic death through crucifixion? The temptation is strong, to rush straight to the resurrection; and concentrating on the good news, jump straight from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. To do this is to skip over the more difficult details of unjust suffering and death that Good Friday raises. Christians also tend to soften the potential grief of the Good Friday experience with the good news of Christ’s victorious triumph over death – something that was forced to my attention when trying to find Good Friday hymns that didn’t mention the resurrection.

God is not just found where there is joy, but also where there is suffering of the worst kind. On Good Friday, the world of Jesus and his followers became broken, both literally and symbolically. The story narrates that the world was literally broken by an earthquake, the tearing of the temple veil, and the broken body of Jesus. It also became broken symbolically, by the apparent disintegration of the movement that Jesus had started and scattering of the disciples.

Good Friday is the one day in the Christian calendar that deliberately brings us face to face with a God who is implicit in Jesus’ suffering, and who suffers with us. For most Christians this is anathema, as we rather like to believe that that God is all love and has no part of suffering. This not only ignores the fact that Jesus was allegedly destined to die in this rather nasty way by God, but actually ignores what the bible says on the matter. The book of Isaiah in verse 45:7 challenges the typical Christian conclusions about the true source of good and evil: “I ... the LORD ... form light and create darkness; I make weal and I create woe”.

Rather than a God overflowing with goodwill to all humankind, we find instead one who creates both light and darkness, good and evil, and who promises us “the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places” (Isaiah 45:3).

What does this mean?

Good Friday is the day that acknowledges both ‘weal and woe’ and ‘light and darkness’ as being created by God. It simultaneously faces the terrors of the cosmos whilst defiantly claiming God is a God of personal love. It resolves the paradox of suffering not by deciding that God is indifferent to our fate, but by proclaiming that the same God willingly suffers that fate. It offers a new metaphor of brokenness as a gift, not a liability. In one of the great paradoxes of Christianity, God’s presence and divine consolation is found in the cross, in a story that has indeed become redemptive.

Surely the hidden treasures that God offers us are the new understandings we can find as we journey through darkness of Good Friday, where we are more vulnerable, and more open to both questioning and receiving wisdom than when we are pre-occupied with the busyness and seductive glare of our daylight selves.

Good Friday invites us to walk on a less travelled road, a darkened road where there is pain and doubt and suffering, a road that invites questions and encourages us to search, but that also invites us to consider that the our human longing for spring and new life is somehow fulfilled on a bare hill where a bare tree holds the body of a crucified God.  As Peter said, “Where else could we go?”