Good Friday
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.” Hebrews, 4:15
It’s hard for us to imagine in our day and age the boundless cruelty of the Roman Empire. In order to terrify and cease any hint of rebellion against everything they stood for at the time in which Jesus lived, they went to every extent possible to torment, to degrade, to humiliate, to torture, and to demean any person who dared to present a challenge to their authority.
And that was before they employed the ultimate agony of all: crucifixion.
Jesus was fully aware of this. This is what was going on within him in what we now call the “agony in the garden.” He knew what was in store for him. He knew the pain, the intense suffering, the horrifying misery that awaited him. He even cried out: “Father, if it be your will, let this cup pass.”
But even so, he chose to embrace as fully as he could all that pain and all that shocking suffering.
Why?
Because he wanted to demonstrate in the most dramatically gruesome way that the God he was in full communion with also wanted to be in full communion with all those down through the centuries who are to this very day crying out in horrible pain.
He wanted to give full testimony to this one reality:
Our God is in complete solidarity with all of our pain and all of our heartaches and all of our suffering.
The cross of Calvary is the ultimate image of how our God suffers “with” us, and “in” us, and “through” us.
And what it says loudly is that Calvary is everywhere in the world we live in to this day. Calvary is anywhere people are being scourged, stripped, broken, pierced. Calvary is anywhere people are being treated with utter indignity, anywhere people are being abused and tormented and despised.
There is the Calvary of war and bigotry; the Calvary of persecution and poverty.
There is the Calvary within our own hearts whenever we turn toward sin and choose to turn away from Christ.
The world is haunted by all kinds of Calvary’s.
But what Good Friday tells us is that suffering and pain and heartache and disease and cruelties of all kind are not the end.
This Friday is “good” because we can be assured that in the midst of all our pains and suffering, in the midst of all our own heartaches and sins, our God is there with us – suffering with us, agonizing with us, in solidarity with us.
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way….”
