We rightly call Good Friday “Good” because Jesus himself said, “Greater love has no man than this:  that he lay down his life for his friends.”  The cross is where our sin debt was paid; the cross is where we receive our righteousness; the cross is where our own pending death met its end. So it is that he is the Lamb slain—and for that he is worthy.

Yet, for all that he would gain for us through the cross, and for all that he himself would regain on the other side of the cross—make no mistake—the cross was a place of shame, pain and suffering.

From the human standpoint it was the place where criminals received a horrendous execution for their crimes.  Its physical pain was beyond our comprehension; few among us can possibly conceive what it would be like to be driven to a stake of wood by sharpened iron more akin to railroad spikes than nails.  And, by God’s amazing grace, none of God’s people will  ever  know its spiritual suffering:  the outpouring of the full wrath of God, the turning away of his presence—the descent, as it were, into hell, on our behalf.

No, the cross was a horrible place for Jesus to be—a place of untold sorrow.  And yet it was to that very place that Jesus  had  to go—for the Scriptures say it was “necessary for the Christ to suffer and then enter into his glory” (Luke 24:26); “for the joy set before him he endured the cross (Hebrews 12:2).”  

For this reason, then, it can truly be said that the cross is a place where joy and sorrow meet. This meeting of joy and sorrow was not God’s wrangling some good out of tragedy; it was not God finding a way to make the best of an unthinkable crime.  Far from that—it was in fact the very will of God, the united purpose of Father, Son and Spirit from before the foundation of the world:

…he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth….

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief…(Isaiah 53:5-7, 10).

 “It was the will of the LORD to crush him…”  His sacred head was wounded, ultimately, by God himself—for our peace with him.

What language, then, shall we borrow to offer thanks for the love God has shown through Christ?

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:9, 10).

Perhaps there is, indeed, no language at all in this fallen world that can be borrowed that will fully express thanks for such amazing love.  But those who know this love cannot help but try—or else the rocks would cry out.

On Good Friday we look at the cross—and this Good Friday should be no different.  The cross is the believing sinner’s justification for claiming the forgiveness of sins.  

For this very reason the cross is also, just as literally, the believing sinner’s claim to joy; indeed, the cross is how God sets before us the joy that calls us to endure!  It is the cross that delivers us from God’s wrath against our sin; it is the cross that proclaims to us God’s forgiveness; it is the cross that declares to us the old has gone and the new has come.  

All that sin would keep us imprisoned within has, by the power of Christ’s cross, been thrown off; all that sin would keep from our enjoyment—above all, the enjoyment of the Lord himself—has by the cross now overflowed into our lives.