20070406 Good Friday

It was Friday night, the beginning of the Sabbath, and the world was dark not just because of nightfall, but because death was upon it. Yeshua, the teacher and prophet, so recently hailed as the Son of David, to whom shouts of “Hosanna” were called by children, lay dead in a borrowed tomb. His disciples were scattered, the one who betrayed him now dead by his own hand.

What had happened? Just the night before, the crisis seemed to have passed, yet now the disciples reeled from the death of their teacher and friend. They hid and wept because not only was he dead, but he was betrayed by the hand of one of their own. They hid because they had abandoned him. They hid because they feared they were next. They hid because their secret hopes of the coming of the Kingdom of God seemed to have died on a Roman cross that afternoon.

It had been a horrible death. When Yeshua died, the earth trembled as if rebelling against the notion of his death. Somehow, the curtain in the Temple guarding the Holiest of Holies was torn in two. People were saying that the dead had risen and were visiting them. Even the Roman centurion watching him die was moved by the force of his death. When they pierced his side after his death, blood and water had flowed out, the sign of a broken heart.

Of all of Yeshua’s friends and companions of the past three years, only his mother, some of the women who followed him, and John remained before the cross. On that cross, he had cried out in agony, called out for his God who had abandoned him to die. Yet in that agony, he had asked his dear friend John to care for his mother. He had promised paradise to one of the criminals executed that day. He had asked for the forgiveness of the executioners.

His road to the cross had been agonizing too. While he carried his cross to Golgotha, the place he was executed, he had endured the shouts and jeers of a frenzied crowd who had just days before praised him. He endured the shouts of the mob at the governor’s palace, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” as be bled from the terrible scourging ordered by the governor and from the crown of thorns his soldiers left dug into his skin.

In fact, Yeshua’s road was agony because he had not slept for days now, and had eaten little. He was dehydrated and injured not just from the soldiers, but from the beatings he had received at the hands of the leaders of the Jews after he had been arrested. He was exhausted from being paraded from one part of Jerusalem to another, the prize of a successful plot to arrest him and have him executed.

That agony was compounded because one of his own friends had betrayed him, and that friend was now dead. Judas hung himself in hopelessness after seeing what he had done. Yeshua could not reach out to comfort him and restore him. Yeshua’s heart was broken because the rest of his friends had abandoned him when he needed them most. Even Peter, who boldly declared that he would die with him, then fled and denied he ever knew him.

What had happened then? What had gone so wrong that Friday night as death hung like a pall over Yeshua’s disciples and the city of Jerusalem, just a day after they had celebrated the most remarkable Passover of their lives? In a word, nothing.

What had happened was everything that Yeshua, Jesus Christ the Messiah, had been telling His disciples since He first started teaching them. Jesus told them that He was going to be arrested by the Jewish leaders and executed, and that was exactly what had happened. His death was so much more than that, though. The Law, the Prophets, and Jesus Himself had testified that His mission was to come to earth for a single purpose, and that purpose was to die the very death that had just occurred.

That death was not just some arbitrary act of political leaders, nor was it simply the fulfillment of some jealousy on the part of powerful people who felt their power was threatened. Jesus’ death was the will of His Father, our Father, the God of Heaven who demanded the perfect sacrifice for the sin that all mankind carried in them as a curse since the first moment Adam and Even disobeyed that same God and ate from the forbidden tree.

What had happened was that Jesus had fulfilled the promise God made from that moment of sin to redeem His people from that sin by His own action, not something that His people did. Jesus died so that His disciples, His followers, indeed everyone who trusts in His name can receive the promised righteousness of God by grace through faith. What had happened is that Jesus had died so that we might live, saved from the curse of sin by His own blood.

That death is the center of our redemption, the hope of our salvation found in the death of our God upon the cross on our behalf. That death is the center of our faith, the fulfillment of God’s promise to each of us that He would redeem us from our sin. God fulfilled that promise. Jesus lay dead in a borrowed tomb, and our sin lay dead with Him.

Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion, and death

Jesus death as the atonement for our sin

-=DLH=-