holy week devotional

thoughts on good friday

Hi, everyone. I delivered the following as a devotional to the faculty and staff at my school this morning. I hope it encourages you to walk in a deeper experience of our Lord’s death and resurrection in this Holy Week.

Good morning, my friends. It is always an honor to be able to address you, especially this week, the most precious week of the year for our faith.

In a unique way, church and church services dominate our lives this week. Two days ago, we waved palm fronds at my church and processed into the sanctuary singing “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” On Thursday, we will go to an evening service where we wash each other’s feet—an extremely humbling experience, if you have never had it—and remember that kind and lowly act of service that Jesus performed the night before his death. On Friday, we will go to another evening service and commemorate the agony of Christ’s crucifixion. On Saturday, we will wait. Some of us will fast and remember our entombed Lord. And then, on Sunday, we will dress up in our brightest dress clothes, gather together, and shout out the Hallelujah that has been silenced during Lent, remembering Christ’s triumph over death and the grave, the fact that he trampled death. This has been the rhythm of the church for centuries, and it is a beautiful thing.

Every year, I have the privilege of walking my seniors in the Senior Bible class through 1 Corinthians 15, which is Paul’s most majestic defense of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And I plead with them, and with myself, to cling to this fact. Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus. “¹⁷ And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope^[b] in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” And it is this that allows us to sing, “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

There are so many things to talk about this week, so many things to reflect upon. This is my favorite week of the year because of the way I am so saturated with thoughts of God and time spent with other believers. In this week, as the church, we experience the emotional ups-and-downs of this life. On Thursday, we participate in a love that serves, even in lowly tasks. On Friday, we remember a love that sacrifices, and the “greater love” Jesus showed on the cross. On Saturday, we experience a quiet day of waiting, and embody a love that is patient and hopeful. On Sunday, we celebrate a love that resurrects, a love that welcomes us into the presence of Love itself. Service, death, waiting, triumph. It’s all there.

This morning, though, I want to zero in on Good Friday. I wondered as a child why we called that day “good.” When I was in graduate school, and I promise this is the nerdiest I will get this morning, I studied the Old English language and the word for “good”—“god”—meant beneficial, complete, righteous, even holy. It is not inappropriate to think of that day as Holy Friday. And it is right to call it good because the outcome was good, because, as he has done since the book of Genesis, God took something man intended for evil and turned it to good.

But I want to focus our attention on Good Friday because we are prone to overlook the day. I don’t think it is unfair to say that much of American Christianity wants Easter Sunday without Good Friday. We want the celebration without the lament, the feast without the fast, resurrection without death. Many churches today no longer offer a Good Friday service, skipping straight from Palm Sunday to Easter.

Good Friday makes us uncomfortable. At my church on Friday evening, we will collectively voice our direct responsibility for Jesus’ death. During the gospel reading of Jesus’ trial, the congregation will shout out “Crucify him, crucify him” along with the mob. We know we are complicit, but we don’t like to say it aloud. At the end of the service, we will be instructed to leave in silence after we watch the communion table be stripped bare. It’s depressing! Kind of a bummer start to a weekend.

Death and thoughts of death, more generally, we work to avoid. We push it to the margins, to specialized buildings. We plan entire cities without making room for cemeteries. We do not want any somber reminders of our mortality as we drive to dinner. Again, I don’t think it goes too far to say that most American Christians have bought into Prosperity Gospel theology, at least a bit. We may not consciously preach that gospel, we might reject it if we heard it explicitly preached, but there is some part of us that views our faith as something designed to enrich our lives and save us from a lot of the pain and suffering that marks a human life in a fallen world. We have lost touch with the historical experience of so many of our predecessors in the faith: with the knowledge that pain, sorrow, suffering, and death draw us closer to the God who experienced all of them.

Just as Easter Sunday demands our belief in a literal, physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead, Good Friday demands our belief in a literal, physical death. There is no metaphor here. This is concrete, real, palpable. Good Friday demands that we spend some time soaking in Jesus’ death. We have to remember both the weight of our sin and the depth of our estrangement and separation from God. We have to remember that nothing less than the death of God could work about our reconciliation.

But there is another truth here, too, an unexpected one.

Because the sacred truth of our faith is that we too must die so that we may live, that in our salvation we mimic and participate in Christ’s death and resurrection. This is why Paul writes what he does in Romans 6:

³ Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Or, in the very first verse I memorized after coming to Christ right before my senior year of high school: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Or, in Colossians: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3)

We must think about Christ’s death, my brothers and sisters, because in his death we too have died. On the other side of Christ’s death and resurrection, we can join him. We have joined him. This is the good news of Good Friday. May it be on our hearts as we go about the good work God has given us to do this week.

Closing Prayer

O merciful God,
you have made all people and hate nothing you have made,
nor do you desire the death of sinners,
but rather that they should turn to you and live:
have mercy on all who do not know you
as you are revealed in the gospel of your Son.
Take away from them all ignorance, hardness of heart,
and contempt for your word;
and so draw them to yourself, blessed Lord,
that they may be gathered into your flock,
under the one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.