…AND THE LORD HAS LAID ON HIM THE INIQUITY OF US ALL (ISAIAH 53:6).

Good Friday. The irony of the name has proven hard to reconcile for many. What’s so good about a sham trial, brutal torture, and the most humiliating and excruciating form of execution conceivable? “Good Friday is filled to the brim with blood, injustice, and death” (McCauley, 2022).

Over 700 years before the death of Jesus at Calvary, the prophet Isaiah foretold this day and our role in it. “We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way…” (Isaiah 53:6). We are none innocent. In ways great and small, we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)—short of the image we were created to bear in an insurmountable violation of purpose. “…and the LORD has punished (laid on) Him with the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6).

And what a punishment it was, bearing the wrath of God against sin. “…This is the day when the Living Water says, ‘I thirst.’ It is the day when the Bread of Life hungers, the Resurrection and the Life dies, the Priest becomes the sacrifice, the King of the Jews is killed like a criminal. No wonder we stammer in the face of this mystery” (Witvliet, 2010). A cross not only ended a life but did so in the most ridiculing way possible—by magnifying Caesar’s domination over the one gasping for air on a stake. With Roman soldiers standing around and crowds screaming in rage and laughter, Good Friday looked like the triumph of Babel, right down to the signs in multiple languages over the head of the crucified King (Moore, 2022). “The cross forces us to take seriously our sins and those of the world. Our trespasses are of grave concern” (McCauley, 2022).

We dare not minimize the cross of Christ, softening its blow to our notions of self-righteousness or “self-help-ability.” We dare not repackage it with a nobility it was never afforded. Recognizing this tendency, the Rev. Fleming Rutledge (2019) warned, “‘A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of Christ without a cross.’ When this happens, we may have religiosity, we may have uplift, we may have spirituality, but we do not have Christianity.” The Apostle Peter, quoting the Prophet Isaiah long before him, rightly described a crucified Savior as “…a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense,” (1 Peter 2:8) skandalon in the original Greek. The word of the cross—its necessity, its brutality, its humiliation—is scandalous.

And yet, “We gather on Good Friday not to wallow in guilt, but to announce that sin and guilt have been atoned for, conquered, healed, addressed, dealt with once and for all, in heaven and on earth through the blood of the cross” (Witvliet, 2010). Good Friday is not the story of tragedy, but of triumph.

On this day, when the sky became dark at noon, when the temple curtain was torn in two, when time on this tired earth nearly stood still—on this day when "God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross"—we whisper with great joy: "Welcome all wonders in one sight. Eternity shut in a span. Summer in winter. Day in night. Heaven in earth. And God in man."
Behold, the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (Witvliet, 2010).

“Jesus is the beginning of the resistance. In Him God declares that sin and death will not always rule… The cross of Christ is not an ending, a final act of evil in a world that knows only the destruction of good. The cross is evil meeting a more powerful foe: Emmanuel, God with us, even unto death” (McCauley, 2022). Jesus our propitiation “set [His] passion, cross, and death between [His] judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death” (The Book of Common Prayer, 1979).

We have no such claim apart from the saving work of Jesus at Calvary. “So we weep at the evil our sins have caused, but we also rejoice in the glory of God. We remember the price by which we were purchased and the life it opened up to us. We find our strength at the cross, where God’s Son became weak for us” (McCauley, 2022). And we join with those redeemed through the shed blood of Jesus Christ in prayer:

“Almighty God, we pray You graciously to behold this Your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen” (The Book of Common Prayer, 1979).

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