A Reflection On Good Friday

Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. The lights, the songs, and the true meaning of the season always fills my heart with such joy. But as I have grown older, I’ve noticed my affections for another Christian holiday growing: Easter. Yes, I love springtime, pastel colors, and bunnies, but that is not why Easter has been slowly becoming my favorite holiday.

There is so much to process around why we celebrate this holiday. So much preparation for that Sunday. Not food prep or getting Easter baskets ready but the preparation of our hearts. The whole season of Lent leads you right into Resurrection Sunday, and the week before Easter is time to reflect on how Jesus lived the last week of his life. There is fasting and feasting. Sorrow and celebration. The whole spectrum of emotions for the most important day in history.

Easter is not a new holiday to me. My family has celebrated ever since I can remember, and as my relationship with Christ grew, the importance of this season grew as well. This year was the first time Colby and I attended a Good Friday service and it was really beautiful. I really took space to reflect on what this day was like two thousand years ago. How painful this day must have been. As I read the story in Mark 15 of Jesus’s death, I was overcome with sorrow. I imagined being there watching with Mary and all the other women. When he breathed his last breath, I thought of the disappointment all his followers must have felt. “My Savior, why are you letting this happen?” “I saw the miracles you performed with my own eyes!” “If you can perform all those miracles Lord, why won’t you save yourself?”

I think of my own prayers and groanings I would have said watching. I would have begged and pleaded for my Savior to come down from that cross. I would have been bargaining with the Man up there to save His own life. And yet, He knew that the bigger miracle was yet to come.

How many times have I begged Jesus to take something or fix something and wonder why in all His power, He has not done it yet? Now, I think of the cross. How Jesus had all this power and he stayed up on that cross. He stayed there because he knew there was no finality in His death. He knew what would happen three days later and what it all meant. So he stayed on that cross and endured that suffering.

Why do we think our lives should be any different? God does not withhold good from us for no reason. It might sound cliché, but there is purpose in suffering. It sucks sometimes. Its frustrating and annoying and sometimes all you want to do is scream at God and ask Him why He won’t do the thing. But think of Jesus. He begged for that cup to be taken from Him and it wasn’t. And in the end, we were saved. The world forever changed by that unanswered prayer.

It’s not easy to sit with an unanswered prayer. With suffering almost suffocating you while it feels like God is not listening. But He hears. And He answers. It may take a while, but God sits with you in the waiting. There is tension in realizing all the power God has to do, well, anything, but the reality that He doesn’t always do THE thing we ask for. Looking to Jesus’s death reminds us that even if God doesn’t do the thing we plead for, goodness still prevails. That Friday all those years ago was dark. No one knew what was coming because it looked liked the final door had been closed shut.

Sometimes we sit in that same darkness, but the difference between then and now is that we know. We know what happened to our Savior. We know that death is not the end. We know there is hope. The doors never fully close because of Jesus. When prayers go unanswered remember what you know. Keep praying and holding on to hope. The troubles of this world have no match to the joys of Heaven thanks to Jesus.