Even in the midst of the sorrow, pain, and shame of the cross, Good Friday is still very good.
I do not look forward to Good Friday. I’m an upbeat kind of guy. A negative situation is always an opportunity, not a problem. The glass is always half full, and more is probably on the way.
But all that changes on Good Friday. Sure I feel down and out other days of the year. The waves of life will do that to you. But Good Friday plunges me into a much darker place. Waves of sadness, emptiness, and hopelessness come crashing in on Good Friday.
For many years, I took part a Tenebrae service on Good Friday (from a Latin word meaning “darkness”). During the service, a candle is extinguished after each reading of the last seven words of Jesus on his way to the cross. The sanctuary gets progressively darker and darker. After Jesus’ last words from the cross are read, the last candle is put out, plunging the sanctuary into darkness. The last words hanging in the air are the question, “What is to become of the light of the world?”
We left in silence contemplating a world where God never came to save, where the light never shined into darkness, where all was death and silence forever. We left still burdened with our sin and lost in our brokenness. The reality of it all was devastating.
The Abyss
After a Good Friday service like this, even the most affable of people cannot resist the pull toward the abyss. Alcoholism, addictions, anger, violence, or any kind of struggle to overcome a world made meaningless all make sense to me on Good Friday. I can understand why people respond to the darkness of the world with more darkness, more destruction, more death. Why not? What else is there to do?
And yet for Jesus, for the one who died that Good Friday death, Hebrews 12:2 tells us that it was “for the ...
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