It’s Good Friday, the day Christians commemorate Jesus’ crucifixion and death. It’s a strange day to call “good.”
Jesus’ death was the stuff of horror movies, and the Bible doesn’t spare us the details. Unflinching, it forces us to look toward Golgotha, the place of the skull, and watch as His hands and feet are nailed to a cross. For hours, He suffers. He cries out. And then, when the world was enveloped in darkness, He dies.
The Crucifixion been dramatized countless times in the centuries since. Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ is probably the bloodiest, and many would say the best, modern depiction. But the version that floors me is during “Gethsemane” in 1973’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Admittedly, the song’s theology is … questionable. Jesus (played by Ted Neeley) seems all-too-mortal here. But at about the 3:50 mark in the following clip, an anguished, angry Jesus sings, “just watch me die,” and we’re thrown forward to the crucifixion.
Nothing conveys the pain and suffering of Christ more viscerally or eloquently than the classic painters of yore. It’s breathtaking, and terrible, to see.
This wasn’t a “good” Friday. I don’t think anyone thought it was a great day. Maybe the Pharisees were relieved, but I doubt anyone threw a party that night. We already know that Pilate was unsettled with his role in Jesus’ death. And Jesus’ followers—most of whom forgot His own promise to come back—must’ve felt like their world had come to an end. When Jesus died, their hope died with him.
In many movies, there comes a point where all seems lost. Frodo won’t drop the Ring into Mount Doom. Indy can’t blow up the Ark. Luke Skywalker drawn inexorably to the Dark Side as the Emperor cackles. “It is unavoidable,” he says. “It is your destiny. You, like your father, are now mine.”
But then, the turnaround. When evil looks like it won, it loses. When all hope is lost, it returns. Improbably. Inexplicably. Astoundingly.
God loves stories. And he seems to especially love the crazy twist endings. Most of His own stories seem to have them: There can be no redemption without a fall. There can be no life without death.
But for the biggest story of all, He didn’t want to leave us hanging. Just as Jesus told His disciples that He was coming back, God tells us that, with Christ’s resurrection, we’re on our way to “happily ever after.” The battle wrapped up around 2,000 years ago. He didn’t want to leave us without hope, so He spoiled the ending for us.
It’s easy for us to lose sight that this global story has a happy ending. We, like Jesus’ disciples, forget. And sometimes, even when we do remember, we doubt. How could we not when someone purposefully flies a plane into a mountain and kills 150 people? How could we not when Islamic gunmen slaughter 147 Kenyans just because they’re Christian? It feels like we live in the ninth hour sometimes, when darkness is all around us and there seems no hope of light. The promises of God seem so far away.
But I trust in God’s spoiler. I believe in happy endings. And that puts the good in Good Friday: The hope and faith that a glorious Easter is coming.
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