This post is an annual event I usually post on Maunday Thursday to raise awareness of some of the smaller events of hearts 2,000 plus years ago that took place that night and into early Good Friday morning and what it all now means to me. The original posting was also a Maunday Thursday twelve years ago. I reflected on this version of Good Friday morning from within the current chaos of a world more confused and divided than ever. Our story never changes, but the worldly confusion and chaos only seem to deepen.
I may edit a bit this year, as writers do, and I appreciate remembering the message I feel more every year. Good Friday can slip by too easily amidst preparations for celebrating Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. His ultimate return is even more significant this year than ever before. We see signs of the Last Days, notwithstanding wars and rumors of wars, nation against nation, and the lingering hangover of COVID and new disease variants. Hatred is running at an all-time high. What better time to be prepared for His return?
If we had not been gifted by the path He took for us on Good Friday over 2,000 years ago, the bunnies, plastic grass, and colored eggs would have been all that mattered on Easter Sunday. I hope those of you reading this for the first time (or again) feel the increased appreciation for Good Friday as I have, and I welcome those of you here reading these words. Happy Easter!
Peace! G.
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It was Thursday night. Jesus had just broken bread and given it to his disciples to represent His body, the wine, His blood. Later that evening, they left the upper room and walked to the olive grove called Gethsemane, where Jesus sat three of His disciples down and urged them to keep watch as he went deeper into the grove to pray. He took Peter, John, and James with him for a short distance before asking them to sit and wait while he walked deeper into the grove and fell to pray.
In Matthew 26:37, Jesus is described as “sorrowful and deeply distressed.” Who wouldn’t be? He had the foreknowledge of everything that would happen to him and the suffering he would have no choice but to endure. All that suffering yet to come seemed obvious, but I never considered His greatest agony’s trustworthy source, and I missed it entirely for many years.
Seriously, why not ask God to stop this craziness and avoid all the suffering to come? In verse 39 of Matthew 26, He prays, “Oh my Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” And he prayed in that manner three separate times. “Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”[Luke 22:43] What kind of stress was He experiencing to cause bleeding? Indeed, it had to be a stressful form of agony, but not the ultimate misery, the greatest, unavoidable agony we easily miss in the chaos of all the physical suffering he experienced.
I had always believed when He was in the garden, He was agonizing over the suffering of impending torture, public humiliation, and painful death by crucifixion. With His prayers asking not to drink from the bitter cup, I never considered “the bitter cup” as anything other than the agony of crucifixion. Still, it was so much more significant to us all.
There was something else troubling him – Fear. Not fear of dying because that is why He came to the earth in the first place. Not the fear of the pain of crucifixion, either. His greatest fear was that His mission would fail – His earthly mission – to die as the Son of Man…instead of the Son of God. He could only die as the Son of Man because it was the Sin of man he was destined to take on.
Oswald Chambers writes of this fear, which I had never considered. True, Jesus was God, but He was also a man, and He had to take on all mankind’s sins and die as the Son of Man, or His earthly mission would fail. Opting out of that role and into the heavenly protections afforded as the Son of God would represent a mission failure, and fighting the temptation to go there caused great fear. But still, there was yet another agony that haunted Him, and there was no escape.
And then they showed up to seize him and in John 18:4…”Therefore, Jesus, knowing all things that would come upon Him, said to them, “Whom are you seeking?” He was talking to the mob armed with clubs and soldiers with swords that had come to arrest Him. He already knew who they were and why they were there. He had been betrayed by one of His own. He knew it would all happen like that and expected it.
Something else I missed was Judas’ motivation. He did not hate Jesus; he loved Him, but His love was based on Jesus being a warrior, not a pacifist. He fully intended for Jesus to rise and call on God to crush the Roman occupation, and when that never materialized, Judas tried to force it by turning Him over to the authorities. Surely, that would trigger His power and launch a military campaign as a warrior.
Okay, back to the garden…so an angel had strengthened Him, and now He boldly walks up to the mob, knowing fully who they were and why they were there. If you saw the “Passion of the Christ,” you know what happens next: absolute agony of countless tortures until He gives up the Spirit on the cross at 3 PM on Good Friday. But that is the agony we all know about. There was another much more intense agony to Jesus that gets glossed over by the distraction of the gruesome details and the graphic accounting of torture and death by crucifixion. We do not witness it until the moment He dies on the cross.
Friday morning, I will have my routine breakfast omelet and too much coffee, review a story outline, and research for a new book underway. My watch will go off at 9:00 AM Friday and I’ll wonder if the hammering had stopped by then. Over two thousand years ago, my Lord Jesus…“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.’ [Isaiah 53:5]
And He walked right into it. He had choices. He could have defended himself in the garden. He could have played the role of the Son of God and called legions of angels to rescue Him. By telling the mob, “I am he,” they fell to the ground. He was tempted one last time to turn away when he prayed in Gethsemane the night before. But He found strength in His Father God and embraced His Father’s will instead of His own.
And yet, He was not a servant to God; He was God, is God, and yet He was also a servant to us. He was the Son of Man. “There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance, nothing to attract us to him. He was despised and rejected – a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.” [Isaiah 53:2-3]
So many turned away. The multitudes that shouted “Hosanna!” earlier in the week when He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey’s colt were the same ones who loudly called out, “Give us Barabbas!” and “Crucify him!” a day later. They turned away when He did not behave as the warrior they hoped He would be. It is so easy to turn away and be part of the crowd. We perpetuate the turning away even today.
Jesus did not fight back. He did not defend himself. He kept quiet when confronted by the high priest Caiaphas, “He plied Him with many questions, but Jesus gave him no answer.” [Luke 23:9] and displayed what was seen as constant weakness. “Yet it was our weakness he carried; our sorrows weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins!” [Isaiah 53:4] How could so many have been so wrong?
He ensured agony through His actions and His ultimate choices. Again, I’m not talking about the physical torture and the excruciating pain of being crucified; I am talking about that moment of separation from His Father to be the Son of Man. That was the essential part of the deal. To accept the burden of sin for all humankind was the moment His Father, our God, turned away, separating from His Son when He drank from the bitter cup to accept our sin. That was the agony he suffered that I missed when Christ cried out. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani,” which means My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?[Matthew 27:46]. That was the moment of agony we can easily miss, that moment God the Father had to turn away from His Son who became Sin for us.
The entire event had been prophesied, even His last words, when Christ quoted the first verse of the 22nd Psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?” [Psalms 22:1]
I could never understand why Jesus would question His Father like that. His cry came from a moment of agony none of us will ever know…because of what He did for us. The weight of the sin of every one of us was borne upon Him at that moment, and His Father turned away in His hatred of sin. Could there be a more significant moment of agony from complete separation from His Father God than that? Could there be a greater agony for a man who lived a perfect life only to experience the crushing weight of all the world’s sin while nailed to a cross? He took that on for all of us, and then He died taking all of it with Him. Yes, He died for me…for all of us.
I doubt the sun will darken around noon this Friday for three hours as it did then. I doubt the earth will shake, and we will likely miss the significance of the temple veil ripping down the middle. At 3 PM, when His suffering finally ended, what will show up in our lives and remind us that our sins had just died with Him? I wonder where I will be and what things of this world will be distracting me then. I must set the alarm for 3 PM to remember when He sealed the deal with finishing it in His death.
Life these days is busy. It is frightening. War in Ukraine, crazy inflation, and hatred of each other terrorize our lives. Even remembering the murder of our Lord Jesus went down over two thousand years ago can be frightening. The sharp edges of those memories that pained the hearts of those who witnessed His suffering back then are blunted for us by time. Who among us could ever imagine that shocking emptiness that must have filled the hearts of His followers back then? Who could blame the Disciples for scattering, running in fear for their lives? Jesus dying on that cross had to have been seen as an epic failure in their eyes. Life was frightening then, too.
There will be no shock factor of that magnitude disrupting our weekend festivities. Why spoil a holiday by remembering that He suffered for the better part of an entire day before dying for us? It is so easy to become distracted, but we must remember. We cannot allow ourselves to forget, or we will turn away and let that memory slip away. There can be no more turning away.
We all have the free will to choose to remember…or not. We all have the free will to turn away. I turn. I am broken. I turn every day. The world and the enemy pursue me and welcome my turning. Turning away is the easiest way to fit in with this world. But… methinks the time has come to stop turning away. It is time to choose differently. It is time to remember Who I owe… Who we owe.
Welcome Christ into your heart and your life on this Good Friday, and remember that He did not turn away from you… me… or any of us. We were the ones to turn away, but we can turn back in His mercy and grace. It’s time to turn.
Join me with Thank God It’s Good Friday, and through the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of His Son…for us…we have something to turn toward – something to remember.
In Christ,
Gary G. Wise
Writer of Things, Storyteller
gdogwise@gmail.com
(317) 437-2555
After 13 years of maintaining a professional blog that tracked with the latter third of a 35+ year corporate learning and development career, I struggled with walking away. How do you abandon thousands of hours of training content, articles, and knowledge-sharing posts on a blog that define a documented trail of who you were, what you did, and who gave a rip…or not?
