Holy Friday

O Lord my God, I will sing to You a funeral hymn, a song at Your burial; for by Your burial You have opened for me the gates of life and by Your death You have slain death and hell.

-Synaxarion

The sun may rise first in the East, but Easter (Pascha) almost always comes later for the faithful who live in the area where Jesus lived. Every Friday is a little Holy Friday for all Christians, just as each Sunday is a commemoration of Pascha. The week is an image of the year and the year of Holy History.

Holy Friday marks the death of Jesus Christ, yet not for one moment was Christ defeated. He was in agony in the Garden, his friends betrayed Him, and He felt the pain of whippings and brutal punishment. Excruciating pain on the cross, the weight of the sins of the world, all of this was painful, but none was defeat. The God-man suffered and was buried. Each act was a blow against death and hell as normative for humankind.

The God-man harrowed the place of the dead, setting captive humanity free.

Thank you, Jesus.

The hard road from Bethlehem to Golgotha was hard. A preacher who says one can confess, pray, or shout away hardness has not read the command of Jesus to take up our cross and follow Him. Our crosses are little, small reminders of what He did, but they are not defeats. Our crosses, including obedience to our leaders who have told us to stay home on Pascha, do not save the world or even (in one sense) us. They are symbols of victory.

Lent reminds us that we need not eat when or what we wish.  We can give to those with less and take time to pray. These crosses are painful victories, proving our freedom from some of our appetites.

Of course, life in this broken world presents us harder crosses. These are flung at us and many are very painful. Human life ends in death and death is not enjoyable. Victory, however, is now possible in death, since that death is not for us as death once was. Death was a one-way  trip to the place of the dead. Now there is a chance for eternal life not as some disembodied shade, but in the new heavens and the new earth.

Death cannot win. That does not remove the pain of death and should not be read as a message to “cheer up” or make a better “confession” so to change the circumstances. If Jesus could weep at death, we can weep, even if we know, as Jesus knew at the tomb of Lazarus that death would not have the final victory. A test is hard, the school for souls is rigorous, victory is given to us by the Lord Jesus Christ.

His death is the promise of our victory. His death gives us hope and in that hope we carry on in this Holy Friday. The Day will come when all the images will pass away. We will see the saints face to face. We will be in the culmination of Holy History. The work finished by Jesus on the cross will now be experienced as finished by all of us. We need only look up from the stinking cadavers of death and hell and look forward.

Victory is His and He has made His victory accessible to us from love.