Good Friday – “Good?” Brothers and Sisters who share the same heavenly Father, may you get what you do not deserve, never get what you do, and may you also have peace from God all through the blood of Jesus. Amen.
Good Friday! Good? No, no. We’ve got the wrong adjective here. We’re talking about a day where a man is betrayed by His closest friends, brutally tortured, spit on, mocked, gruesomely pierced to a large chunk of wood and hung to die in front of his mother. And He was completely innocent. Sad Friday? Bad Friday? Wicked Friday? Disgraceful Friday? Corrupt Friday? Atrocious Friday? Anything but ‘Good’ Friday. How is this good? How can this even be called good?
Perhaps this day is called ‘Good’ because of the central person we remember. Jesus, the suffering and killed man, was good. He was perfect man – He was perfect God. His record, His life, cannot be called anything but good. His teachings were radical and the epitome of loving God and neighbour. His prophesying was 100% accurate. He knew He would be betrayed. He knew He would die. His love for us was 100% true – and 100% undeserved. Hanging on the cross to die was the author of all good. He wrote the whole of creation into existence. Everything and anything good is from Him. Everything dark and evil comes from where He isn’t.
This service is dark. This service shows the weight of Jesus dying. This service shows the power of the creator of good, dying. We will end this service in darkness. We will end this service with Jesus’ body being laid in a tomb for the dead. We end this service remembering that Jesus died.
Jesus died with the weight of the whole world on His shoulders. Jesus died bearing the sin of all mankind and took it down with Him into death. Your sins, my sins, they have been taken down to die in the death of Jesus we remember today. Your sins are forgiven by THE ONLY GOD that exists. Any other inkling you have of a God, any ideas you have about the divine, put them to the side and look at who that God has come and shown you He is. He came down from His throne, He lived as a human, and He died a brutal death in order to clear up your broken relationship with God and take you back into Himself. You are of so much value that God suffered this for you. Because He loves you. He sees you as valuable no matter how broken and lost you are – and have been. He forgives you and makes you good. He gives you the guarantee of an Easter. An Easter for all people who will rise. That makes the events of this day, not just bad, but truly good. In Jesus name, Amen.