Why Good?

A reflection for Good Friday

Good Friday is a strange name for the worst day in the Christian story.

No other major religious observance names itself so counterintuitively. We don't call the night of the Last Supper Good Thursday. We don't call the exile from Eden Good Tuesday. But we call the day of the crucifixion Good Friday, and we have called it that for a very long time, and most of us have never stopped to ask why.

The most likely explanation is linguistic. In older English, "good" carried the meaning of "holy" or "sacred." Good Friday was simply Holy Friday, set apart, weighted, worthy of attention. The word shifted over centuries, but the name stayed. Which means we have been walking around with a mistranslation in our mouths for so long that it has started to feel like theology.

And maybe it has become theology. Maybe the name has earned its strangeness.

I have been sitting with that question, in the middle of everything else this week has held.

Some of us were in the streets last Saturday. Some of us are managing deep personal struggles. Some of us are exhausted in ways that are hard to name. And some of us are more alive with purpose than we have felt in years. Most of us are probably some of each. That is the particular texture of this moment, and I don't think we should rush past it, even on the way to Easter.

The story we tell this week doesn't rush past it either. In fact, the four gospels, the four people who tried hardest to make sense of what happened on that Friday, couldn't even agree on what they saw. And I find that oddly comforting. Because it means the complexity you are carrying into this week is not a problem to be solved before you can enter the story. It means you are already in it.

Mark's Jesus dies crying out in abandonment. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? No answer comes. No comfort arrives. The centurion at the foot of the cross says truly this man was God's Son, but Jesus doesn't hear it. He is already gone. Mark's Friday is raw and uncomforted and refuses to explain itself. It just sits there in the dark and dares you to stay.

Matthew keeps that cry but adds something seismic. The earth shakes. The temple veil tears from top to bottom. Tombs open and the dead walk into the city. Matthew's Friday is not just the death of a man. It is a cosmic event. The whole created order registers what has happened. The ground itself cannot hold still.

Luke's Jesus doesn't cry out in abandonment at all. Luke's Jesus prays for the people killing him. Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing. He turns to the criminal dying beside him and says today you will be with me in paradise. Even while dying, he cannot stop caring for people. Luke's Friday is full of mercy in the middle of its darkness.

And then there is John. John's Jesus is in control from beginning to end. He carries his own cross. He speaks with authority even from the cross. He makes sure his mother is cared for. And when the end comes, he doesn't cry out. He says quietly and completely: It is finished. In Greek, tetelestai. Completed. Accomplished. Not defeated. Done.

Four gospels. Four Fridays. Four answers to the question of who this person was and what his death means.

The church has sometimes treated this as a problem to be harmonized, as if the real job is to flatten the four accounts into one tidy story. I have never found that helpful. I think the four gospels give us four different Fridays because human beings need four different Fridays.

Some of us come to this day from a place of real abandonment. We know what it is to cry out and hear nothing back. We need Mark's Jesus, the one who died with the question still on his lips. That is not a failure of faith. That is faith pushed to its outermost edge and still holding on.

Some of us come carrying the weight of what we have done or what has been done to us, and we need Luke's Jesus, the one who prays for forgiveness before anyone has asked for it, who turns to the person dying beside him and says you are not alone in this, and it is not too late.

Some of us are watching a world come apart at the seams and we need Matthew's Friday, the reminder that when love is crucified the ground shakes, the veil tears, something fundamental shifts. That what happens to the vulnerable and the innocent is not a small private matter and that the universe registers it.

And some of us need John's Friday, the one that says even this, even here, even now, something is being completed that we cannot yet fully see. It is finished not as defeat but as arrival. The long work of love, accomplished.

As a pastor, I have stood at a lot of bedsides and gravesides and kitchen tables where the question underneath everything was the one Good Friday asks out loud: where is God in this?

I don't have a clean answer. I never have. But what I have found, again and again, is that the question itself is holy ground. That the willingness to stay in the darkness rather than rush to the light is one of the most courageous things a human being can do.

Good Friday asks us to stay. To not rush to Sunday. To sit with the question before we reach for the answer Easter offers.

Which Jesus do you need this year?

Sit with that. Let the answer find you. And when it does, you may discover for yourself why this Friday is called "Good."

See you at the cross.

Pastor Robin