Not Why But Who: A Meditation on Good Friday

by Walter Henegar

Most of us deliberately avoid talking about the worst things that have happened to us, especially the grisly details. But in telling the story of Jesus, the Gospel writers go out of their way to linger with them. For the thirty years between Jesus’ infancy and his adulthood, Luke alone gives us a single enigmatic story. For the twenty-four hours leading up to his death, they slow down and narrate every agonizing moment. Why?

One answer is to help us deal with our own suffering.

In my experience as a pastor, suffering is the number one reason people either reject Jesus altogether, or struggle to trust him in their believing. If he could prevent suffering and death, why doesn’t he? But the Bible never gives us a definitive answer. It simply reminds us in a thousand different ways that if God is wise enough and powerful enough to prevent every bad thing from happening, then he’s also wise enough and powerful enough to have reasons we can’t comprehend—including reasons that are more beautiful than anything we could imagine.

The Bible doesn’t tell us why, but it does tell us Who. When we ask, Why should I trust you, Jesus, when you could have prevented these bad things? One of the ways he answers us is, Let me show you how I suffered. This is one of the gifts of Good Friday. Consider your own experience.

Have you been betrayed? When you trusted someone with your heart or your body, but they walked away, they shared your secrets, they chose someone else or something else instead of you. Jesus knows exactly what that’s like. When he was washing Judas’s feet, he knew the same feet were about to run to trade his life for a handful of coins. When he served Peter the Last Supper, he knew Peter was about to trade his loyal love for the good opinion of anonymous bystanders. When he was agonizing in prayer, his inner circle traded solidarity with him for a little extra sleep. Twice.

Have you suffered physically? Maybe a lifelong disability or a chronic illness—something that everybody notices, or that nobody ever sees? Maybe an acute trauma brought on by an accident or a disease? Whatever it looks like, the collective pain you have felt in your body is more than you ever thought you could bear. Jesus knows exactly what that’s like. He was tortured, his flesh shredded with one of the most sadistic devices humanity has ever invented, so they could press his back against another device that was designed to kill him as slowly as possible.

Have you been treated unfairly? Maybe you’ve been discriminated against because of your race, your sex, your culture, or some other thing you have absolutely no control over—and in subtle or blatant ways, you got the message: You will never be one of us. Jesus knows exactly what that’s like. His entire trial was a mockery of justice. He wasn’t just innocent of the charges against him; he was innocent of every charge they could possibly make!

Have you been marginalized and misunderstood? Maybe your most loving intentions were interpreted as ambition or perversion or meanness? Jesus knows exactly what that’s like. They spit on him and taunted him to prophesy who punched him. They jabbed a crown of spiked thorns into his scalp and went out of their way to write as sign mockingly saying, “King of the Jews.”

Have you been publicly humiliated? Maybe some of your most private realities were paraded for the entertainment of others, helplessly stripping you of any agency to do anything about it—because everybody saw, or everybody heard, or because the internet is forever? Jesus knows exactly what that’s like, because of one detail almost never depicted in scenes of the crucifixion: He was naked. For six hours. He couldn’t even partly cover himself, because his hands were nailed apart, and his legs were nailed together.

Are you grieving the death of someone you loved? Jesus knows exactly what that’s like. And I’m not talking about Lazarus or John the Baptist. When you’re the one dying, you are grieving the loss of everyone you love! They were all being taken from him. Every single one.

Have you ever felt so utterly alone that no one could understand what it’s like to be you, and it seemed like the best thing you could do for the world would be to remove yourself from it? Jesus knows exactly what that’s like. In fact, he knows it better than any of us! Because it wasn’t just people who forsook him; it was also God the Father. When we suffer, at least we have our own company. But the Trinity is three persons in one God, so in some mysterious way that we can’t fully comprehend, Jesus was even alienated from himself!

So one reason Jesus suffered all these things, and more, is so that when we suffer in ways that are not our fault, we know that the God who could have prevented them is not distant and isolated, watching idly from an air-conditioned control tower. No. He is with us, near to us, and weeping with us. He knows the exact taste of the salt of the tears on his parched and cracked tongue.

But that’s not the only way Good Friday helps us. There’s another big category of suffering we all know, too: We suffer in ways that are our fault. When people reject us because we’ve been obnoxious and selfish. When they stop trusting us because we’ve been untrustworthy. When we break promises and take advantage of others’ weaknesses. When we neglect and abuse our own bodies, and then experience the natural consequences of those choices.

You might think, “Surely Jesus has no idea what that kind of suffering is like!” But Good Friday says he does. Not because he ever had sin of his own, but because he was taking on ours.

2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin.” Paul isn’t just saying that Jesus took on our punishment. He took our actual sin that deserved the punishment! And he didn’t start doing it on Good Friday. He was doing it every second of his earthly life. This staggering fact was made clear at his baptism. Our baptisms are about cleansing. His baptism was about dirtying, about so deeply yoking himself with sinful humanity that he was qualified to take our place.

So by Good Friday, when his sufferings had intensified into unimaginable cruelties, he was not only tasting the bitter vinegar of human injustice, but also the blazing furnace of perfect divine justice. Which means that:

When people looked at him as deceitful, self-absorbed, and fake—he was.

When people looked at him as an abuser, a pervert, a racist—he was.

When people looked at him as a murderer, a criminal, an enemy of the state — he was.

He was all of those things, because we are all of those things, and on the cross he became us—both a victim and a victimizer. Which is another way of saying that he knows exactly what it’s like to be us.

But it’s even better than that, because: Precisely because in that moment when he was becoming both the ultimate victim and victimizer, he was also destroying the power of suffering and death. And that made him the ultimate victor. As John Stott wrote, it looked like evil had defeated goodness, but goodness was defeating evil. It looked like he was crushed by the ruthless power of Rome, but he was crushing the head of the Serpent. It looked like he was being stripped of all power, but the cross was becoming, and is still, the throne from which he rules the world.

Good Friday doesn’t tell us why we suffer, but it does show us the heart of One who suffers with us, who is powerful enough to turn unimaginable pain into indescribable joy. And if that is going to mean anything to you personally, you’ve got to connect it to your own story. So when Scripture shows you the specific sufferings of Jesus, do not turn away. Linger on them and meditate on them until you can’t help think of your own life: the suffering you don’t deserve, the suffering you do deserve, and the hope you couldn’t possibly have unless he—the ultimate victim, the vicarious victimizer, and the cosmic victor—did it all for you. Personally. Specifically. Exhaustively. That’s what it means to have faith. That’s what it means to be a Christian. That’s what it means to trust him in this life where we will all suffer, until the day when he returns to abolish suffering once and for all.

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Walter Henegar is the senior pastor of Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church