The “Good” in Good Friday

In a chapter of his book The Cross of Christ, John Stott attempts to answer a question about God that is posed in every generation. It is not a question really, but an accusation. And since there is, for many people, no good answer, the question ends up as a condemnation.

Stott relates a story told by Elie Wiesel in his book Night, the account of Wiesel’s boyhood experiences in the death camps of Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald. “Perhaps the most horrifying experience of all was when the guards first tortured and then hanged a young boy, ‘a child with a refined and beautiful face,’ a ‘sad-eyed angel.’ Just before the hanging Elie heard someone behind him whisper, ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ Thousands of prisoners were forced to watch the hanging (it took the boy half an hour to die) and then to march past, looking him full in the face. Behind him Elie heard the same voice ask, ‘Where is God now?’” Wiesel says that he heard a voice inside himself say, ‘Here he is-he is hanging here on this gallows.’

Stott makes the point that Wiesel’s "words were truer than he knew." While Wiesel makes it clear that he considered God dead at that moment, refusing to believe in a God that would allow people to be tortured, gassed and burned, the scriptures are full of statements and examples of God suffering with his people and also of God in Christ suffering with us yet.

God suffered with his people enslaved in Egypt. Jesus wept over the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the coming destruction. Jesus asked Saul on the Damascus road why he was persecuting him, signifying his identification with the persecuted early church. Jesus clearly identifies himself with the stranger, the sick, the naked and the prisoner: as we treat them so we treat him. And of course God humiliated himself, became human and subjected himself to hatred, cruelty, injustice and death on a Roman cross.

I do not worship a God who is aloof and above and beyond human suffering. He is not immune or insensitive to the misery of my world. Wherever I go I follow in his steps because he came before me and suffered.

Stott concludes, “That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his.”

The suffering and death of our world makes sense only in the light of divine suffering, of God’s sacrificial suffering on the cross. This is why I can claim the “Good” in Good Friday.