Good Friday

I'm helping lead the Good Friday service at our church tonight. I've been thinking and musing about the time all week and wanted to share here what I'm sharing with the folks who come tonight.

This evening can be a difficult time. It’s hard to slow down our minds from a busy week and focus on today’s significance. It’s hard to be comfortable in the silence. It's hard to sit in the darkness. It’s hard to find some way to relate to the events of today’s history. 

But I think what’s even harder is to enter into the horrific details that we will be reminded of tonight. A betrayal from a beloved disciple; a trial where the most righteous person in the world is falsely accused; a choice of a thief over the Savior; a beating with a whip lined with bones and metal, ripping through the flesh of the perfect lamb; a purple robe and crown of thorns that taunt and mock; strangers who spit in the face of Jesus and beat him over and over; and finally, a brutal crucifixion.

These are not easy things. And it’s difficult to allow ourselves to enter fully into the story of tonight. This is perhaps because if we truly allowed ourselves to be present, to imagine what it was like, to put ourselves in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, we would break under the despair and sorrow of it. Our souls would be crushed by the searing pain of abandonment and agony Christ suffered. And so it’s our default, perhaps even our coping mechanism, to bypass the horror that the gospels narrate on this Friday. Perhaps we would rather fast forward to the power and victory of the resurrection. We’re more comfortable with that Jesus, than the one depicted on this day they call Good. 

However, let’s challenge ourselves tonight to be in this moment. To walk with Jesus through the betrayal, through the trial, through the pain. To allow ourselves in some small way to experience what he experienced. For it’s in this pain and the journey through it that we really understand what our Jesus did for us. It’s through the utter awfulness of Good Friday that the triumph of Sunday is made glorious. But we cannot get to Sunday without Friday. 

As we begin tonight, I’d like to pray for us. 

Lord Jesus, 

We confess tonight that we’re not comfortable with the events of this day. When we really sit with them, they are terrifying and horrendous and give us cause for despair. We don’t understand how you bore up under this. Help us, Jesus, to be present to the events of today’s history. Help us to know that we are part of this story; help us to acknowledge that all of this – all the pain and rejection and sorrow – was for us. You endured the darkness to end all darkness for eternity. On this night, when we sit in the depths of what you endured, your cross reminds us of what is coming. Help us to not give up. Help us not to give in. Help us to be here. 

Amen.