Good (?) Friday
Isn’t it interesting that we want to call this holiday “good” Friday? It seems to me this is great evidence of our inability to sit with things that are not good. We wrap the day up with the eventual outcome of the resurrection so we can call it good, rather than sitting with the darkness that the day was.
Imagine it, you are part of the Jewish people, living under an oppressive foreign occupation and you are waiting for liberation. If you followed Jesus, you believed he was it. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and you were sure this was the fulfillment of the promise. You sang, and cheered and laid palm branches underneath the hooves as he rode in. Your hope was high. Elated even. This was it. The thing your people had been waiting for – for years.
Then, just a few days later, you go from the heights to the depths. He is executed. He who was supposed to liberate you from your oppression is defeated by the oppressor. All hope is shattered. You feel like a fool for believing it. Or you feel stupid for getting your hopes up. Or you feel even more enraged at the oppressive government you find yourself under.
If you were in Jesus’ inner circle, this fall from the heights to the depths might have been even greater. He was the son of God, or you might have even caught on that he was God incarnate. How could the blessed of God be forsaken and cursed? Or even more puzzling, how could God incarnate – die? How could we go from the heights of “God with us” to the depths of “God is dead” ?
But that is all of life isn’t it? A vibration between highs and lows, life and death, heaven and hell, good and evil, light and darkness. Life becomes agonizing if we can only accept the highs, the good, the life, the light. If we can’t vibrate along with the vibration of the universe.
Regardless of what you believe about it, at least one aspect of the Jesus story is at least on some level a story about that vibration. He was one with God, in heaven and descended to earth, which in many ways is its own kind of hell. Then descended into a tortured death, then we are told descended into hell itself (whatever that’s supposed to mean). And didn’t bounce right back up but sat with it.
Sat with this life on earth, which we all know can be a kind of hell – for 33 years.
Sat in death for 3 days.
Could’ve presumably “fixed” it – by preventing it from happening (“if you are the Son of God, come down from that cross”) or by resurrecting immediately.
But didn’t. Sat with it. Darkness, pain, death, despair.
I think this Friday is an opportunity for us to practice that.
Not to make it a good Friday by thinking forward to the resurrection, but to just sit with it, descend into it. It’s half of life after all.
Pain.