What's So Good About It?

I imagine that people of other faiths, and even some Christians, wonder “what’s so good about Good Friday?” Certainly, Jesus' disciples did not call it good on that day, when they nearly all fled the scene and even Peter publicly denied him. Our Christian theology, however, explains that it is good because today Jesus made a perfect sacrifice of love on behalf of the whole world.

We call this day good now because we know that his death is not end of the story...resurrection was just a short time away. And we can call this day good because it gives us hope; because we have confidence, through this sacrifice of Jesus, that all our personal stories also will end with life, not death; with joy, not sorrow.

But...we still have to live through the sorrow, even as we have hope in the future. We still suffer, we still experience pain and loss and grief. The great paradox of our faith is that there is great joy even in the midst of suffering, pain, loss and grief. Time folds in on itself and we experience Good Friday and Easter Sunday all at once.

Two years ago I was thinking deeply about these things in regard to my sister Debbie and her brain injury. I thought I would share some of those thoughts again today.

"We rejoice with gratitude toward God at each sign of progress, at each little step toward full recovery. We want to go to the “happy place”, where Debbie is back to her old self, full of life and fun and energy. And I see no reason to think that won’t happen...

"Yet I also realize that it can be tempting to jump to the end of the journey, and forget about what it will cost Debbie to get there. All I have to do, however, is ask myself if there is any one of us who would be willing to trade places with Debbie or Manolo right now. Not me - I don’t want my world turned upside down, interrupted. I don’t want to lay helpless in a hospital bed, facing pain and people messing with me all the time and countless hours of work just to be able to take care of myself again. But this is Debbie’s path - and Manolo’s grief, too, bereft of his beloved for a while and watching her suffer. 

"And I know that many of you reading this have also been (and may be going) through suffering, of many various kinds: physical, emotional, spiritual. 

"That’s where the hope of Good Friday comes in: it tells us that our suffering, like Christ’s, is not in vain. It is not the end of the story. Neither is it simply a detour or something to be gotten over and forgotten. It changes us and those around us, and when we join it to Jesus’ suffering and let him use it for good it can even bring us a deep kind of unexplainable joy."

May God bless you all today as you experience the mystery of the Cross.