Report index / source-articles
good-friday-the-day-of-crucifixion-what-we-are-remembering-and-how-to-keep-it-we.md
Source: /Users/borker/dev/hybrid-blog-writer-26-voice-pipeline/outputs/simple/pete-nicholas/good-friday-the-day-of-crucifixion-what-we-are-remembering-and-how-to-keep-it-we.md
<!-- seed: pete-nicholas | model: anthropic/claude-opus-4.7 | target_words: 2500 | actual_words: 2744 | audience: 94/100 in 1 rounds | stylometric_dist: 0.0093 | foibles_overlap: 0.633 | same_author_llm: False | slop: 0.73 | elapsed_s: 224.7 -->
# The Day the City Kept Moving
Last Good Friday I stood outside our church building at half eight in the morning, cross in hand, waiting for the procession to begin. The buses were running. The coffee shops were full. A man in Lycra cycled past without looking up. London had somewhere to be, and it wasn't here. Which is fine—I'm not nostalgic for a Christendom that enforced solemnity from the outside. But I did find myself wondering: if we no longer mark this day, do we still know what we lost?
The procession was small. A few of us from the church, a wooden cross my friend had made the week before, and a child who kept asking why we were walking so slowly. We crossed two main roads and stopped traffic for about forty seconds. A woman on the pavement crossed herself, which surprised me. A delivery driver swore at us, which didn't. By nine fifteen we were back inside drinking instant coffee from paper cups, and the city was carrying on with its Friday.
What I want to argue in what follows is that Good Friday is not a mood to cultivate but an event to reckon with. It is the execution of God in a specific city on a specific afternoon, and the church's job is to hold that event open for a culture that has quietly closed it.
## What Actually Happened on That Friday
Strip away the stained glass for a moment. A man in his early thirties, a Galilean carpenter turned itinerant teacher, was arrested at night in a garden after a meal with his closest friends. One of those friends had taken money to point him out to the arresting party. Another, the most vocal of the lot, swore three times that he didn't know him. The rest scattered.
He was tried twice—once by a religious council and once by the Roman governor of the province—and both verdicts were rushed, irregular, and politically motivated. He was flogged. The Roman flogging was designed to bring a man to the edge of death without quite finishing the job, so that the cross could finish it slowly. He carried the crossbeam through the streets until he couldn't, and a man from North Africa was conscripted to carry it for him. He was nailed to a wooden post outside the city walls, between two condemned criminals, and he hung there for about six hours while passers-by mocked him and his mother watched.
This is the brute historical fact, and Christians believe two things about it that the surrounding culture does not. First, that the man on the middle cross was God. Second, that this was not a tragedy that befell him but a death he chose. The friends who watched and did nothing eventually came to believe both of these things, and the movement they started has, in various states of fidelity and infidelity, been claiming them ever since.
You cannot soften this. Christianity is the only world religion whose central image is a state execution.
## Why the Day Has Disappeared
When I was a child Good Friday meant hot cross buns and nothing else open. The shops were shut. The roads were quiet. You couldn't watch much on television beyond an old film about Moses. It was, even for an entirely secular family like mine, a day with a different texture.
That texture has gone, and it has not gone through persecution. No one decided to abolish Good Friday. It simply became a Friday with extra shopping. The bank holiday remains, but the bank holiday is now the point. Garden centres do a roaring trade. Easter has been re-imagined as a long weekend with chocolate at one end and a barbeque at the other, and Good Friday is just the Friday before.
I don't think this is principally the fault of consumerism, though consumerism has happily filled the vacuum. The deeper shift is that our culture has become relentlessly forward-looking and therapeutic. We are encouraged to process, to grow, to optimise, to heal. We are not encouraged to stop and look at a corpse. A day whose entire liturgical logic is to sit with a death—to refuse the rush to resolution—cuts against everything the present moment tells us to do with difficulty.
There is also a quieter cause. Many churches themselves have stopped marking the day well. We have Easter Sunday services that go straight to the empty tomb without making anyone walk past the cross to get there. We have worship songs that mention the cross as a kind of decorative reference point but never as a place where God screamed. I have led services like this myself, and I am not pointing the finger from outside. If the day has disappeared from the wider culture, part of the reason is that the church often acts as though Friday were just a delay before Sunday.
## The Problem with Skipping Straight to Sunday
I want to be careful here. The resurrection is the centre of Christian faith. Paul is unambiguous: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). I am not arguing for a permanent residence at the cross at the expense of the empty tomb.
But Easter without Good Friday is not Christianity. It is a resurrection myth, and there are plenty of those. Many religions and stories tell of dying and rising gods, of seasonal renewal, of life springing from death in some general cosmic pattern. What makes the Christian claim distinctive is not that a man came back from the dead but that this particular man, having been killed in this particular way, for these particular reasons, came back from the dead. Subtract the particularity of Friday and Sunday becomes generic spring.
The pastoral cost of this is enormous. A faith without Friday produces a forgiveness with no price tag, which is a forgiveness no one quite believes in. It produces a hope that has never looked at the worst thing and so cannot speak to anyone who has. It produces a Jesus who is essentially nice, and a God who is essentially absent from the actual textures of human pain.
I sit with people in this city whose lives have been wrecked by things that no positive spin can repair—bereavements, betrayals, addictions, abuses. None of them needs a Christianity that skips Friday. They need a God who has been there. The reason Good Friday matters, pastorally, is that it is the day Christians claim God has been there.
## What the Cross Is Actually Doing
Ask a Christian what the cross does and you will get a range of answers, most of them partially right. Paul gives several. The cross is a sacrifice for sins, a ransom from slavery, a defeat of the powers, a reconciling of enemies, a revealing of God's love. Isaiah, writing centuries earlier, sees a suffering servant who was "pierced for our transgressions," by whose wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:5). Augustine, reading both, speaks of a substitution in which Christ takes what we deserve and gives us what he deserves.
I think it is a mistake to harmonise these too quickly. The New Testament writers themselves do not seem worried about producing a single tidy atonement theory. They pile up images; they borrow from the temple and the slave market and the law court and the battlefield. The cross is dense enough to require all of them and more.
What unites the images, though, is the claim that something objective happens on Friday afternoon. The cross is not primarily a moral example, although it is that. It is not primarily a demonstration of how much God loves us, although it is that too. It is an event in which the sin that separates us from God is dealt with, decisively and in our place. Paul puts it as starkly as language permits: "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
This is the sentence that took me longest to believe when I came to faith at university, because it offends both ways. It offends the secular conscience by suggesting that I might actually need rescuing rather than affirming. And it offends the religious conscience by suggesting that the rescue cannot be earned. The cross is equally hard on the moralist and the libertine, which is a useful test for whether you are looking at the real thing.
## Nietzsche Was Paying Attention
I keep a copy of Nietzsche on my shelf, and I think every preacher should. He saw what most cultured admirers of Jesus refuse to see. The cross, he understood, was scandalous. Christianity, he wrote, "took the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted" and called this love. It glorified suffering. It made a virtue of meekness. It produced what he called a slave morality, in contrast to the noble values of strength, beauty, and self-assertion that he believed the Greeks and Romans had embodied.
Nietzsche is right about what he sees. He is wrong about what it means.
He is right that the cross does precisely what he accuses it of doing. It does honour weakness. It does sanctify suffering. It does take the side of the crushed against the crushers. The first sermon Jesus preached opened with blessings on the poor, the mourning, and the meek, and it has scandalised every honest pagan since.
But Nietzsche is wrong to think this is a celebration of weakness for its own sake. The cross is not a glorification of victimhood. It is the claim that the God who made the universe entered into weakness in order to redeem the weak from the inside. It is not that suffering is good. It is that God has been into suffering and come out the other side, and so there is no place in human experience where he is not now found. This is a strength Nietzsche could not see because his categories of strong and weak had collapsed into each other at exactly the wrong point.
I find it useful, when I am preaching on Good Friday, to assume Nietzsche is in the congregation. He sharpens what is at stake. He stops us preaching a tame cross. He reminds us that what we are saying is genuinely strange and not at all what natural human religion would produce—which is, incidentally, a small argument for its being true.
## How to Keep the Day Well
So what do we actually do with this day, here, now, in a city that has stopped marking it?
I want to suggest some practices, not as medieval relics to be dusted off, but as counter-cultural acts of attention. The point of these is not to manufacture an emotion. The point is to give the event time and space to do its own work on us.
First, fast in some form. Skip a meal. Drink only water. The body has its own way of knowing things the mind resists, and a stomach that is hungry on Good Friday knows something a full stomach does not. This is not earning anything. It is letting the day touch the body.
Second, sit in silence with one of the Gospel passion narratives. Read it slowly. Read it more than once. Resist the urge to find a devotional thought to take away. The text is not a vending machine. Let it be strange. Notice what offends you. Notice what you skim over.
Third, gather with other Christians, even briefly. Good Friday is not principally a private grief. The church remembers together. A simple service of readings, a few hymns sung slowly, a long silence, a stripped communion table—these things will do more than any sermon I have ever preached. Liturgy is the deposit of two thousand years of believers trying to keep this day open, and we don't have to invent it from scratch.
Fourth, do not skip to Sunday. Not yet. Stay in the dark. The dark is allowed. One of the gifts of the church calendar is that it gives us permission to be where we actually are, and on Good Friday we are at a tomb that has not yet been opened. Saturday is its own day. Let Saturday come before Sunday.
Fifth, be available. The strangest thing about Good Friday in a secular city is how many people, when given the chance, will quietly want to talk about death. I have had more honest conversations with non-Christians on Good Friday than on almost any other day of the year, perhaps because the day itself, even when ignored, has a kind of gravity. If you are in church in the morning, leave the door open in the afternoon. Be the kind of presence that someone in the street might walk towards.
## The Cross in a Divided City
The cross was planted outside the city walls. This is not an incidental detail. Hebrews makes much of it: "Jesus suffered outside the gate," in the place of shame, with the unclean (Hebrews 13:12). The geography of Golgotha is a theological statement about who God is with.
I have written before about the divisions of London—the poor doors, the postcode wars, the sheer proximity of the drug dealer and the economist on the same bus. A city like this needs a God who is not at the centre but at the edge. The cross is exactly that. It is God refusing the throne and choosing the rubbish heap. It is God being executed between two criminals and not finding the company beneath him.
When the church in a divided city remembers Good Friday well, it remembers where its Lord was killed. Not in the temple. Not in the palace. Outside the walls, between two thieves, in a place no respectable person wanted to be seen. This is the address the church has been given. We do not get to choose a more presentable one.
It is also, incidentally, why a church that is faithful to the cross cannot finally be a respectable institution. We follow a man who was lynched by his society as a criminal. Any version of Christianity that has made its peace with the powers of its city to the point where the cross is merely an ornament has lost the thread. I say this as someone who pastors a church in a city that contains a great deal of money and a great deal of power, and who needs to hear it as much as anyone.
## It Is Finished
The last word Jesus speaks from the cross in John's Gospel is one word in the Greek. *Tetelestai.* It is finished. It is accomplished. It is paid in full.
The word was used on commercial receipts in the first century. When a debt was paid, the bill was stamped *tetelestai*. Paid. Done. Nothing more owed. When Jesus speaks this word from the cross, he is, among other things, stamping the bill.
This is the hardest sentence in the world to believe. Not because the theology is complicated—it isn't—but because almost everything in us insists that there must be something more to pay. Something more to prove. Something more to add. The therapeutic culture tells us we are works in progress. The achievement culture tells us we are what we produce. The religious instinct tells us we must clean ourselves up before we can be loved. *Tetelestai* cuts across all of it.
We need a whole day to sit inside that word. We need to let it dismantle the project of self-justification that we will otherwise resume by Saturday lunchtime. We need to hear it slowly, in liturgy and silence and bread and wine, until something in us begins to relax that has been clenched for as long as we can remember.
The city outside will keep moving. The buses will run. The coffee shops will be full. A man in Lycra will cycle past without looking up. None of that matters. What matters is whether, somewhere in this city, on this particular Friday, a few people are willing to stop and look at what was done at three in the afternoon on a hill outside Jerusalem, and to let that event be what it is.
It is finished. Sit with that. Sunday will come.