pIt is not a good Friday. It is a horrible, horrible Friday. Jesus has been dragged away, to be executed. It takes hours, and in those hours Jesus is suffocating, slowly, losing the ability to hold Himself up on their execution scaffold. As if to top it off, the Romans make a sign to put on top of their scaffold and it reads, sarcastically, ‘KING OF THE JEWS’.br /
It’s not a good Friday. Really though. And today, when we sing about how ‘death has been beaten’ and ‘the grave conquered’, are we letting ourselves come face to face with what that means? The death that Jesus walked Himself into is about as grim a death as you can imagine. Because He was God come as a human, it wasn’t an ordinary death. This was the Creator, wilfully letting Himself be killed so that He could draw a line under the wrong that each human does. So, on that Friday, God was feeling the weight of all human sin. Every individual way a human being has tried to tear itself away from God, and others. Your sin. Our sin. And more than that, He was coming face to face with death, too. When He came out the other side of His execution - which of course He did - there was no power left in sin *or* in death. But we’ll get to that bit in a couple of days./p
pWhat now?br /
Take a good chunk of time - we’d suggest at least 15 mins - and read the crucifixion story in one of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). Even though it’s not nice stuff, try to put yourself in the shoes of a friend of Jesus, watching./p