Good Friday is the hardest day of the year for Christians. We remember all over again what happened when God became a human being. Jesus, who spoke the truth, loved everyone, and lived humbly, was betrayed by friends and enemies alike. A gentle, innocent man who came to teach and heal was tortured and killed. This is the day we remember and relive the passion—the false witnesses, the beating and humiliation, the agony of being nailed to a cross and hanging there for hours. This is the day that the God of heaven and earth died a terrible death.

No wonder every child asks her parents why we call this day good.  No wonder non-Christians are perplexed by us.  No wonder even that many Christians shy away from this day.  Even though we live with the mystery of salvation through the cross throughout the year, we don’t want to revisit the reality of the cross on Good Friday.  The ugliness of Jesus’ death reminds us of all the ugliness still in the world and we don’t really want to be reminded of it.  Like any sane person, we want to avoid pain.

But when a cross is the central symbol of your religion, it is a pretty good sign that avoiding pain is not a real option.  Until we face the truth, about ourselves and about the world, there is no healing and no change.  Only the truth has the power to set us free.   Christianity holds the cross up in our face where we cannot miss it and forces us to look at reality.  We build up false selves based on the principle that we are right enough and good enough and evil lies outside us.  It is those people out there who are responsible for the evil in the world—terrorists, criminals, abusers.  But the cross shatters our false selves and breaks down the separation between us and the sinners of the world.

The cross is a symbol of our hardheartedness then and now. Good Friday is a day to face the truth and mourn. So why do we call this day good?   Because this is also the day we run headlong into the mystery that we are saved through the cross.

God chose the crucifixion, which human beings intended for evil, to be the means of our redemption. This is a mystery so deep that we can ponder it our whole lives and never plumb the depths.  How can such a brutal act become an instrument of God’s saving grace?  How can Jesus’ death at our hands become good news? Theologians call this the scandal of the cross.  It really is shocking that something we recoil from in horror, something as ugly as the cross, has become a symbol of our salvation.

But the cross reveals who God is as well as who we are.  God’s response to our hard heartedness is love. God’s love is revealed in every aspect of Jesus’ life—what he taught and how he lived. But God’s love is revealed even more profoundly on the cross.  Though Jesus was without sin, he willingly identified himself with sinners, in order to find us and embrace us as we really are, and not our false selves.  Our false selves are put to death on the cross with Jesus, so that a new self can be born—a self that is united with God and all other people.

The new life that flows from Jesus’ death is symbolized by the blood and water that flow from Jesus’ side when the soldier pierces him.  The blood and water are rich with symbolism. Where do we see blood and water together but in childbirth?  Through Jesus’ death, he has given birth to us all over again. The agony of death has become the labor pain of birth.  Remember when Jesus told Nicodemus that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, one must be born from above?  And now, that birth has happened.  Just as women endure agony in order to bring a new life into the world, so Jesus suffered agony on the cross in order to bring us new life.

Remember when Jesus told the Samaritan woman that those who drink the water he would give them would never be thirsty?  “The water that I will give them” said Jesus, “will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”  The water that poured from Jesus’ side is the water of the Holy Spirit, bringing us new and eternal life.  It is God’s own life, which has been poured into our hearts through Jesus’ death.

It is through Jesus’ death on the cross that we learn that God’s love is unconditional and infinite—we may do our worst, but nothing will ever stop God from loving us.  Being loved unconditionally enables us to face the truth about ourselves without fear and without losing hope.  God’s unending love enables us to let our false selves die and a new self to be born.

And so the cross has been transformed.  The symbol of our capacity for sin and evil has become the preeminent symbol of God’s love.  An instrument of cruel death has become a sign of new life.

And so, here we are at the cross—that strange, paradoxical sign that God has given us.  Here we are at the cross—sinners and yet beloved by God and bearers of new life.  Here we are before a divine mystery.  Here we are.