What’s So Good About it?
 
What’s so good about it?  Why is Good Friday called “Good” and not “Evil Friday” or “Bad Friday.”  After all, look at all the bad things that happened to Jesus on this day.  All the evil that is perpetrated against him.  You know that book—When Bad Things Happen to Good People?    Well,  nothing worse has ever happened to anyone better than Jesus.  Here was a man who was good beyond anything we have ever experienced in another person.  He was so good, his goodness was alien and sometimes shocking. Indeed, such goodness is frightening and threatening to self-righteous people like you and me.  Church people.
 
It was the goodness of God himself.  Jesus once told a young, very conscientious and deeply religious man who strove to keep the commandments, that no one is good, but God alone.  And we confess and know that Jesus was God.  Perfect God and perfect man.  The good God incarnate, personally active in a flawlessly good human nature.  
 
Good Friday is the day when this perfectly good God-man encountered some really bad people.    But that way of characterizing it, implies that Jesus simply fell into the hands of the wrong sort of human beings.  We know that’s not the way it was at all.  Jesus fate was determined by the best of humanity, the cream of the crop.  
 
First, there are Israelites, Jews, members of the covenant community, God’s special people, the Old Testament church.   They arrest him and bring him to trial.  They, the Jews, the recipients of God’s covenant and promises, those who had been trained in the law and the prophets, those who sung the psalms in there weekly services—they are the ones who forced the decision to crucify Jesus.  Listen again to Luke 23;13-21.  
 
Second, it is the leaders and teachers of God’s people that orchestrate the evil against Jesus.  Luke 22:1-4.  Luke 22:66 (one of the proof texts for Presbyterian church government, I would have you note!  A lot of good I did them).  And the King, too.  Luke 23:8.  Look what they were doing: Luke 23:10.  It ought to knock us down a few notches to see that ostensibly good church people orchestrated Jesus’ execution and at the front of the mob were the pastors, bible scholars, and elders.   Let that sink in.
 
And then there is Pilate, who represents all that is civilized in the Gentile world.  SPQR.  The tamers of the barbarians.  Those who love order, and law, and justice, and courage, and beauty, and poetry, and rhetoric, and family, and honor.  And here is Rome reduced to one in the person of Pilate before his God, and he is weak, vacillating, unable to rule, giving into the mob, as Luke 213:25 puts it “surrendering Jesus to their will.”  
 
And lest you think that anyone in the first century escapes culpability and complicity in these evil deeds, the disciples, the band of men that Jesus has poured his life into for three years, teaching and mentoring them day after day—this close-knit group of men who were privileged like no group of men have ever been since—they  scattered.   They bolted.  At the first sign of trouble, they were outa there.  
 
And their leader, Simon, the one who as renamed  by Jesus “the Rock (Cephas),” well, he disowns Jesus with vehement cursing.   A betrayal that pierced the Lord’s soul with more force than the spear that will puncture his side.  When the rooster crowed, Luke 22:61 says that “the Lord turned and looked straight at Peter.”  He knew.
 
What shall we conclude then?  Are we any better? Not at all! . . . As it is written: “There is no-one righteous, not even one; there is no-one who understands, no-one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no-one who does good, not even one.” “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The poison of vipers is on their lips.” “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” “Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” (Romans 3:9-18).
 
From this perspective, this particular Friday afternoon was not a good day for humanity.    Not a good day for you and I.  It took the Lord’s drawing near through his Son to draw out what we fallen human beings are really like.  The Lord God himself appears to us, talks to us, guides us—everything that so many of us profess to long for—and we kill him.  Hound him to his death.  Nail him to a cross and mock him.
 
How is this good?  It is only good if it opens our eyes.  If we are enabled from the heart to see what we are really like.  If it leads to confession and repentance.  
 
--Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted (Thomas Kelly, 1804).
 
Ye who think of sin but lightly
Nor suppose the evil great
Here may view its nature rightly
Here its guilt may estimate
 
--Johann Heerman (1630) “Ah holy Jesus”
 
Who was the guilty?
Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee: I crucified thee.
 
Can you make that confession?  Or do you still cherish the foolish notion that if you were there, you would have acted differently?  Such is our arrogance and blindness that we all still treasure such thoughts.
 
From what we have seen so far, Good Friday appears like a very bad ending to a promising story—Jesus mission seems to have ended in a shambles of betrayal and death.  A tragedy.  Too bad.  The Lord had done so many good things for us, his people, and all we could do is prepare a cross for him.
 
But there is another vantage point, one that gets to the heart of the reason why the church has called this Good Friday and not Bad Friday.  And it’s not simply that it is always good to know what we are really like and not to be hoodwinked into a superficial judgment about our own goodness.  It is good to know that we are bad, very bad.  It’s relatively good to have such knowledge, but it only highlights a very bad situation, one in which we all seem to be entangled.   This is not why this Friday is judged to be good by us.  
 
You see, the cross, is not primarily the revelation of the depravity of humanity, but of the love of God. It’s not ultimately about the magnitude of our pride and self-righteousness, but the inexpressible humility  and faithfulness of God himself.  How can that be? , you ask?  How can the most cruel, unjust deed every committed in human history have anything to do with God’s inestimable goodness?    
 
The answer is that none of this just happened to Jesus, not one of these terribly bad things was forced upon him against his will.  Rather, he humbly agreed to submit to these injustices, to suffer death innocently on the cross.  He offered himself.  He was not compelled against his will.  This is good, very good for us.  
 
And the evidence that it is true is plastered all over the story of Jesus last three years of public service.  “He steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.”  “I lay down my life,” he says in John 10, “No man takes  it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.”  Jesus willing submits to the armed company of men who come to arrest him.  He could command myriads of angelic warriors at any moment, but he never calls them.  He barely protests his own innocence befoe.  He calls no dream team defense.  His last words, recorded in Luke 23:46, embody his own willful pouring out of his own life and spirit.  “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.”  When he had said this, he breathed his last.
 
Everything is at stake here.  The entire orthodox Christian faith turns on this.  Jesus offered himself, he did not have his life taken from him.  He is not the patron saint of lost causes.  And the cross may not be reduced to an example of martyrdom for a sacred cause.  God Friday is not good for a pity party.  May it never be.  Rather, Jesus gave his life as a ransom for many.  
 
Isaiah 53:12, “. . . he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. for he bore the sin of many. . .”

Gal. 2:20, . . . the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me
Eph. 5:2, . . . Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God
Eph. 5;25,  . . . Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her
1Tim. 2:6, . . .who gave himself as a ransom for all men
Heb. 9:14, How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!
1Pet. 2:24, He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.
1John 3:16, Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us.
Rom. 5:8, But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
 
Good Friday is good—the best—evidence of the extent of God’s love for us.
 
God didn’t press a heavenly button, flip a cosmic switch or mumble a divine incantation in order to renew humanity and creation, God the Son became a man, suffered, and died for us.  Christians are the only one’s that can truly TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday), particularly thank God for that one Friday almost 2000 years ago, when our Lord himself offered himself a sacrifice for our sins.  
 
The cross is the place where God’s love was unveiled.  And who would have thought it.  There was no place in the whole world on that Friday Afternoon which the human mind might have thought less likely to be the locus of the concentrated presence of our loving God that the place called Golgotha.   Only he who has faith can find his loving God and Lord here in bloody shame.
 
For many people Easter is good, the resurrection is good, but the death of Jesus is bad.  But for us, what happened on Easter morning allows us to evaluate what happened on that Friday afternoon as very good.
 
  1. What punishment so strange is suffered yonder!
  2. The Shepherd dies for sheep that loved to wander;
  3. The Master pays the debt his servants owe him,
  4. Who would not know him.
 
Prayer.  Heavenly Father, I pray that we, being rooted and established in love, may be able, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that we  may be filled to the measure of your divine fullness, O God.  Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (Eph. 3:18-21).
A Good Friday Homily
Friday, April 6, 2007