Good Friday
It wasn’t supposed to be this way?
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.”
“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.”
Genesis 1:31 and 2:1-2
“They put a purple robe on him, then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him. And they began to call out to him, ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spat on him. Falling on their knees, they paid homage to him. And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.” Mark 15:16-20
“Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha). There they crucified him, and with him two others—one on each side and Jesus in the middle”. John 19:17-18
“ …Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene…” John 19:25
She was there when He took His first painful breath, the heaving rise and fall of frail infant lungs filling with the stable-livestock stench of no room at the inn. The Breath of life breathing in the inhospitable scent of poverty and want.
And she is here now as He takes His last painful breath, the heaving rise and fall of tortured, bloodied lungs filling with the violent stench of human betrayal and rejection. The Breath of life breathing in the inhospitable scent of the treachery of His creation.
And her heart, all hollowed out by grief, her heart all shredded in threads and aching shards is matched and fathomed only by the grieving heart of God. Her tears mingling with tender tears of Heaven.
She was there when He took His first painful breath, and she is here now for His last. But it is not because He is her son that He now hangs suspended between Heaven and Earth, but because He is God’s.
God’s only beloved Son.
In Whom He delighted.
Abraham was spared this grief, on the mountain in the region of Moriah, the grief of finding your heart all hollowed out by loss. Mary was not.
God was not.
In the same region God spared Abraham’s son, He chooses now not to spare His own¹. His only Son in whom He delighted now hangs limp on a tree He formed, pierced by iron He wrought, as human will beats nails into the flesh of Him who made them.
And who does YHWH grieve more for this day? His Son who bears the weight of the world or His children who hurl that weight upon Him?