There is a problem in most people’s minds with Good Friday. It is not a fun day.
Good Friday is not a celebration. There is no joy, no light. After all, it is the day our Lord and Savior died. There is nothing fun or exciting about that.
Wonderful, yes, but a truly sad wonder. It was through his death that we received the resurrection. There could have been no resurrection without a death. One cannot rise from the dead if one is not dead.
Isaiah 53 says, But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
He came to die. The little baby was born to die. The young man grew up to die. The Savior of the universe, in order to become the Savior, had to die.
And you really cannot celebrate, what one persona called it, a death on a Friday afternoon.
It was such an unglorious death. They grabbed him, the whipped him and then they killed him. Nothing glorious in that.
It was kind of weird when Hollywood made the Passion. The suffering was greater than any suffering ever endured, the death worse, the pain more. We cannot accept the plainness of his birth, his life and his death.
As Isaiah 53 said, He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
That was the problem. People want to make the death more special than it was.
And it was special, but because it was the Son of God. But like his birth and his life, his death was common.
But it had to be. We do not celebrate it because it was horrible. It happened, not because God wanted it, but because we needed it. And it was totally necessary. Not good. No. But it was necessary
Because before you can have resurrection, you first have to have death. And after that death came that resurrection.
That resurrection is what we celebrate, not only on Easter, but on every Sunday morning when we meet.
But the death. That we do not celebrate. That we mourn.
Tonight will be moving, but it will not be a celebration.
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