The Shame and Wonder of Good Friday
Holy Week brings out the best questions in our children.
Last night at the Maundy Thursday service, I heard from a mom who overheard two kids. One said, “Jesus dies tomorrow.” The other asked, “Where is he now?” Answer: “Heaven.” This is both adorable and a good dialogue. They are working out the chronology. When we take Holy Week seriously as an opportunity to walk with Jesus through the world’s greatest week, our kids ask good questions.
But a well-walked Holy Week works on adults as well. Years ago I was in a pastors’ meeting at Bethlehem when we got stuck on the Easter weekend schedule. We had a Saturday night service in those days, and someone raised the concern whether we could really rally to “The Lord is risen indeed” on Saturday night. The table sat stumped for a few minutes, until someone sheepishly suggested, “You know, he is risen right now.” Relief swept through the room, and Christian common sense prevailed.
The Worst Friday
Perhaps the top Holy Week question of all — and this one is both for the kids and the adults too — is, Why do we call it Good Friday? One of our daughters voiced it just last night. Shouldn’t it be Bad Friday? Or, the worst Friday ever?
There is something profoundly right in the question. Yes, in one sense, that holy Friday was the very worst, the most terrible, the most horrible day in the history of the world. No other day comes close to the sheer evil of our human race, Jews and Gentiles together, conspiring to crucify the sinless Son of God. No one has ever deserved less to suffer. No one has ever been more worthy of worship and praise. Oh what horrors this Friday reveals about the very nature of our sin and its murderous intentions toward God himself!
It truly was a horrible Friday, the most horrible Friday. Horror upon horror.
Tree of Suffering and Shame
We grimace today at the thought of nails being driven through human hands and feet. We squirm at a crown of thorns pressed into the brow, piercing the skin, sending blood streaming down the face. And once these violent acts had torn flesh and bone, the pain of crucifixion had only begun. Hours later, many bled out; others died of asphyxiation, eventually too decimated to even breathe. This was not just death, but torture unto death. It was nauseatingly gruesome.
But not only was it calculated to amplify and prolong physical pain; it was designed, almost psychotically, or diabolically, to utterly shame the victim. The horror of the cross was not only that it was done, but that it was done to be seen. It was not only literally excruciating but humiliating in the extreme.
In first-century Palestine, Jesus’s contemporaries were haunted by the regular spectacle of crosses — and their manifest pain and shame — and, added to that ignominy, they knew of God’s own curse, in Scripture, of anyone hanged on a tree (Deuteronomy 21:22–23). Is it any wonder, then, that Paul would speak of a crucified Messiah as utter folly, sheer madness, among unbelievers in his day (1 Corinthians 1:18)? The honor of Messiah and the disgrace of crucifixion made the idea nonsensical and disgusting, contradictory and offensive, preposterous and shameful.
And it’s the public shame of the cross — rather than the pain we might be prone to think of first — that Hebrews mentions at the climax of his rehearsing of the faithful: “For the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2).
Still, we call it Good Friday.
Wondrous Cross
Isaac Watts, the beloved hymnodist, wrote of “the wondrous cross / on which the Prince of glory died.” How can a cross be wondrous?
We call that dreadful day on which Jesus was crucified “Good Friday,” because when God’s Spirit has opened our eyes, we see beyond the horror of that Friday to the glory of Sunday. We see that the death Jesus died, he died not for his own sins, but for ours, so that we could be restored to relationship forever with him and his Father. Even here, on Friday, we see the wonder of the cross breaking through all the horrors. We say “how marvelous,” even as we cringe at the tragedy. We say “what beauty” even at this very moment when sin rises to its ugliest height.
For those of us who have received the gift of new life in our souls, and now believe, and have begun to taste the joy of life with Jesus — which will only grow and sweeten and deepen for all eternity — this is a wonderful cross. This is where the old me decisively died, and where the true me came to life. And this is where God himself showed climactically, for the eyes of faith, what wondrous love he has for us (Romans 5:8).
It was a terrible Friday. And it is Good Friday. We didn’t make it good; God did. God wrote “good” on the single worst day. Which means there is not one day — or week, month, year, or lifetime of suffering — not one trauma, not one loss, not one pain, momentary or chronic — over which God cannot write “good” for you in Christ Jesus. Because of Good Friday, and Resurrection Sunday.
