What, makes, Good Friday, Good Friday? That’s a good question because it was on Friday, perhaps Friday 7 April, 30a.d. at around 3pm, that as the Lord Jesus Christ hanged on the cross, He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33-34, 37-39)
Let’s get real. It has not been a “Good Friday” for most of humanity. The Lord Jesus Christ was not the first person to ever be crucified; nor is he the last. And Jesus was not the first nor the last, to cry out from a “cross:” “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” That horrible cry of “God-forsakenness,” has been shared by countless millions upon millions of people, down through the ages, through infinite tragedies and terrors, that have shaped the experience of human existence.
Consider the testimony of Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Elie Wiesel. Most probably, he has done more than any other man, to make known to all the world, that horrific, mass experience of “God-forsakenness” of Hitler’s Holocaust. When during World War 2 the Nazis slaughtered six million Jews in the death camps, the gas chambers, the furnace ovens where live children and babies were tossed into the flames- alive. I highly recommend you get a copy of his book tilted, Night. He recalls the first night, when as a young boy, earlier a devout student of the Hebrew Scriptures, he was forced to march towards the furnace where living people were pushed into the flames. He saw his own mother and sister forced into an extermination over. Then just as he arrived- the order was given for no more killings that night. But of that night, this Wiesel wrote:
“The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. . . Never shall I shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night . . . . Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God (and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. . . . Never.”[i]
At the prison camp- along with thousands of onlookers, Wiesel was forced to watch hundreds of hangings at the gallows. At one execution they were forced to march past the three victims:
“The two men were no longer alive. But the third rope was still moving: the child [a 13 year old boy] too light, was still breathing . . . And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. . . .
He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eves not yet extinguished.”
Someone behind Wiesel kept asking out loud: “Where is merciful God, where is He? For God’s sake where is God?” Wiesel then recalls that: “From within me [that moment] , I heard a voice answer, Where He is? This is where- hanging here from this gallows . . . “[ii]
Was it a Good Friday: For Elie Wiesel, for the millions of Jews who suffered through the horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust? For the six million Jews who murdered by Hitler? Was it a Good Friday for: The million Tutsis who were murdered by Hutu fanatics during the mid1990’s genocide in Rwanda, when more than a million Tutsi people were murdered, while the industrialised world watched and refused to step in? Has it been a Good Friday for the many other millions who were murdered over the past century through all the genocides across the earth and history? Was it a Good Friday for the 3000 murdered people at the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Centre? Was it a Good Friday for the countless thousands of innocent Iraqi children, women and men indiscriminately killed in cross fires between the warring forces? Has it been a Good Friday for the millions and millions throughout the earth, even now today, who every day suffer the pangs of hunger and malnutrition?
What about even here in Singapore? Is today a Good Friday for a growing number of people right here who every day go to bed hungry- without enough food to eat? Or for those who have been evacuated from their HDB flats? Is it a Good Friday for people and families suffering horrific pain from cancer or other terminal diseases?
How about our mankind’s destruction of this good earth? Where right now, human being are rapidly destroying 1000s animal species from the face of the earth, destroying the ozone layer, destroying the rain forests, destroying the oceans, destroying the earth? Destroying ourselves? Is it a Good Friday?
If we’re honest with ourselves and one another, we must appreciate this reality: The Lord Jesus Christ was not the first person to ever be crucified; nor is he the last. And, Elie Wiesel was not the first or the last to ask the question, “For God’s sake, where is God? For so many, the seeming “silence of God,” is most deafening!
So again, Jesus was not the first nor the last to cry out from a “cross:” “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” The point here is that most of the world’s people’s have experienced a world that- in many respects suggest we’re all living a tragic comedy- a God-forsaken universe- a universe without God. A universe without any ultimate meaning.
“Many atheists deny God because they care so passionately about a caring and personal God . . . [yet] the world around them is inconsistent with a god of love . . . and so they say, ‘There is no God.”[iii] Atheism is their protest against a world where the experience of evil so severely undermines the very idea of God: How can a God, a personal and loving God at that, exists, in a world where evil prospers? Where evil has the power to inflict horrendous pain and suffering?” So again: We are mindful today that most of humanity, has not known this day, as a “Good Friday.
Second, let’s again get real: It was not a “Good Friday” when Jesus suffered on the cross.” I believe we do a great, and irreverent, injustice to Christ’s suffering, when we gloss, or even seek to minimise the depth by which Jesus suffered on that Friday afternoon. But the record is clear: Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (v34)
We well know that prior to the moment of death, the torment of crucifixion- through the onslaught of blood loss, shock, exposure, and dehydration, would result in: The victim’s complete mental and emotional breakdown. That breakdown was evidenced by the most horrific screams of rage, pain, cursing, and utter dereliction- the total experience of abandonment, of “God-forsakenness.”
In that brief wrinkle in time, like any other victim of crucifixion, Jesus screamed out his experience of total God-forsakenness. His words may not have been coherent. That is why some thought (in vv35-36) that Jesus was calling out for the prophet Elijah. But Jesus was not calling for Elijah; neither was he calling for God to save him. He was screaming out the experience of feeling forsaken!
All through the Gospels, we see Jesus at prayer- always calling on God as “Father.” But now for the first time, He in pain cries out not to “Father,” but He cries out with that more distant formal word, “God.” “Why have you forsaken me?”
The verse is indeed most accurate: “Cursed is the man that hangs from a tree!” (Deuteronomy 21:23). There on the cross Jesus’ whole good life was revised; there on the cross, those who orchestrated his death successfully and maligned him into a social misfit, utterly disgraced, ruined, and abandoned.
But Jesus suffered something even far more horrible than other victims of crucifixion: If Jesus Christ was indeed God in the flesh, we cannot escape the hard fact that in this brief wrinkle in eternity, something happened to God. There was some kind of rupture within the person of God. Naked and shivering on the cross, somehow, someway, the Son was separated from the Father. He experienced and felt (if only in feeling but not reality) abandoned by the Father.
Jesus cried out to heaven in tortured agony; and from heaven there came- nothing. There was no audible response from the Father (as there had been at his baptism and transfiguration); there was only silence. Deafening silence.
For those of us who are Christians, we sometimes want so much to think of Jesus as a “hero” on the cross, who heroically rose above the sufferings of His own death; that He calmly took it all in stride.[iv] But let us be warned: If we fail to acknowledge that Jesus Himself suffered the complete experience of abandonment, alienation, of being forsaken even by the Father, we undermine the very message of the Gospel.
We do so because we are entertaining a very pagan and nonChristian idea into the nature of God: The idea that God does not experience suffering, pain, or rejection. For reason even Martin Luther (founder of the Protestant Reformation) calls the crucifixion, the “death of God.”[v] On the cross, God in Christ, somehow in way that boggles the human imagination, experienced death. Which leads us back to our original question: What, makes, Good Friday- Good Friday?”
There is good news. It is Good Friday. For while as we’ve seen this “day,” has not been a “good Friday” for most of humanity, and while as we’ve seen this day was not a “good Friday” when Jesus suffered on the cross,” yet on the cross jesus made this day, Good Friday.
The Scripture says (Mark 16:37) that, “Then Jesus gave a loud cry, and breathed His last.” Just at the moment of His death, just before that moment when His soul was separated from his body, the Bible says, Jesus did not calmly whisper; he shouted! The Greek term here is mega; as in mega department store. At that moment, Jesus screamed out a shout! But Mark’s Gospel does not tell us what at His death, Jesus screamed! But the Gospel of John does: “It is finished! (John 19:30). Or another translation is: “It is achieved!” It is accomplished!” What was achieved?
What was achieved is that this Friday became “God’s Friday!” That is why it is Good Friday! This was the day that God showed Himself to us as, God! This was the day that God proved His love towards us: “God proves His love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:4) Why did Jesus die on the cross? It all begins with the love of God. This cross reveals the depth of God’s love towards us; that He freely enters into our own suffering, and shares our suffering with us. God is there in our suffering, in the midst of evil, God is present and experience in Himself, the very pain of that evil.
When Wiesel watched that 13 year old boy hanging from the gallows, remember his question: “Where is merciful God, where is He? For God’s sake where is God?” Then Wiesel “heard a voice answer, Where He is? This is where- hanging here from this gallows . . . “ But what Wiesel has not yet discovered is this: God in Christ, was indeed there, “hanging from this gallows.”
That is why the centurion cried out in verse 39, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”
This is why Jesus is called Emmanuel: “God with us.” The cross reveals to us that God is with us, and chooses to suffers with us in all our suffering.
This was the day that God struck the death blow to suffering, pain, and death. It’s almost as if, hanging on the cross, Jesus “breathed in” all the world’s hatred, and suffering, and evil. And by doing so, He struck the death blow to suffering, pain, and death. The cross was the means by which God warred against the present existence of evil. So the Bible say, that on the cross, Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities . . . triumphing over them in it.” (Colossians 2:15) He warred not through power but through absorbing the evil in Himself. And this is exactly what the Bible declares: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray . . . and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:5-6)
The truth is, all of us nailed Jesus to the cross. Because at some point in each of our lives, all of us have shown ourselves capable of the most violent of evils and crimes against humanity, against what is good and just, against even God Himself. Everyone one of us nailed Jesus to the cross.[vi] “But God proves His love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:4) This is why Jesus shouted, “It is achieved!”
Finally, this day is Good Friday because: On Sunday, Christ rose from the dead. Ultimately, it’s Easter morning that make today Good Friday. Because on Easter morning, God raised Jesus from the dead. At the end of the day, there is nothing good about Good Friday, apart from Easter morning. For “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.” (1 Corinthians 15:17-20)
Jesus was bodily raised from the dead as the first of a new humanity. God is even restoring and remaking, creation! There is a restoration right now underway! Not just people, but the entire creation. So even now, “resurrection” is happening: from the “inside out.” When we come to Christ, God begins transforming us, from the inside, to the outside. People spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to attend workshops and training programmes with titles like, “Total Transformation,” “Inside-Out” transformation.” Well, this is what God in Christ offer you and I. God is remaking us, by restoring us to Himself. Therefore, even now all over the world, God is raising people from the dead! Remaking us, and transforming us into His own likeness. And this is why today is called, Good Friday.
Notes
[i] Elie Wiesel, Night, trans by Marion Wiesel (New York, NY: Hill and Wang: 1972; 2006), 33-34.
[ii] Wiesel, Night, 64-65.
[iii] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press; Crosswicks, Ltd, 1980), 19.
[iv] Jesus did not eagerly and fearlessly go to the cross. For the night before his crucifixion, Jesus did not pray, “Thank you Father for this opportunity to suffer.” No! He prayed, “Father if it is at all possible, take this cup away from me.”
[v] “For God in His own nature cannot die; but now, since God and man are hunited in one Person, thne death of the man with whom God is one Thing or Person is justly called the death of God” (Luther, On the Councils and Churches, 1539, WLS I, p198); quoted in: Thomas Oden, The Word of Life, Vol. 2 of Systematic Theology (New York, NY: HarperSanFransicso; HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), 341.
[vi] We were there. The cross of Jesus exposes not just “their” sin back then and there but our sin here and now. When we read about them, we read about ourselves.
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