It’s been one of those mornings with little voices rising early, and cranky. Where patience is tried and I’m found wanting. Where my words are too curt, and I see all too clearly the warning that what proceeds from the mouth comes from the heart. My heart wanders far from the grace I’ve been given, and I forget how to love. I slip so easily back into selfishness, and impatience and ingratitude.

And it is because of all of this that I remember that today really is Good Friday. Only within the Christian narrative do we find that doctrine of a god dying a humiliating and undeserved death “good”.

And friends, it is so good.

It is so good because I deserve to hang there, but he did it in my stead. Held physically by nails, this God who could have commanded his own freedom by a legion of angels stayed there beaten and abandoned because of love. Love for a world who hates him; love for me who wanders from him daily, only for him to captivate my heart yet again with his mercy.

It is so good because the story doesn’t end with his death, it only begins. This story reaches its climax in the dew-saturated dawn three days later, where an empty tomb testified to triumph and hope. Hope for a wretch like me, hope that I am being made new by the power of Christ alone.

It is so good because the story ends with that all-consuming fire who is Love, returning as King and setting all things right, and finally freeing us from the chains of our own wretchedness forever.

It is Good Friday indeed.