Good Friday is a day for the grieving and abandoned ones of this world. It is a day for the doubters, agnostics, and skeptics. Good Friday is a day for suspending one’s certainty about Easter and the possibility of resurrection.
As I read the passion narrative, it is clear to me that not even the closest disciples of Jesus thought the crucifixion was anything but the end of him and his movement. One of them betrayed him. The putative lead disciple denied him. And all the rest ran away in fear, lest they be the next to share Jesus’ fate. Even when the faithful women would come to the tomb after the Sabbath, the reason for their visit was to anoint a dead body. The Romans triumphed, as they always do, through the execution of a criminal.
The cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” begs the question about the magnitude of Jesus’ own experience of abandonment—not only abandonment by his followers but especially by God. Some locate this cry within context of Psalm 22, contending this makes it a confession of faith when you read the Psalm to the end. But I have my doubts.
To take seriously the depths of despair belonging to the human condition, I hold open the radical question that Jesus himself by this cry joins the ranks of all those who have abandoned hope—the doubters, agnostics, and atheists of this world—all those who cannot reconcile their personal experiences and the radical evil of this world with the possible existence of God.
The day after Good Friday thus becomes Silent Saturday. On Silent Saturday, the divine incarnating of the human condition encompasses our doubt, unknowing, and rejection. In the tomb, God enters the silence of death itself. We confess in the Apostles’ Creed that Jesus Christ “was crucified, died, and was buried.” But dare we also revisit the confession that Jesus descended into hell?
While Jesus’ descent “to the dead” means he partakes of our mortality, it is even more perilous to confess that Jesus “descended into hell.” Athanasius asserted about the incarnation that what has not been assumed has not been redeemed. Because there are many crucified people in this world, not only in the past but those alive today whose existence is a living hell, dare we imagine on Good Friday that Jesus became one of these?
On Good Friday, the church is called to interrupt its rush to a happy ending. We are called to stop in stunned silence and enter solidarity with those whose circumstances make belief impossible. We are permitted to acknowledge our own doubts, unknowing, and disbelief. We dwell in the abyss of those who cry out, “O my God, why?”
Rev. Dr. Craig Nessan
Academic Dean
Wartburg Theological Seminary
