Good Friday Reflection

Can we understand the Crucifixion as experienced by disciples watching the event?

“All the crowds that had gathered for this spectacle, when they saw what had taken place, went home, striking their chests. But all who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.” —Luke 23:48-49

Try to comprehend the horror and the desolation of the Crucifixion of the Son of God as it was experienced by disciples in the midst of the event.

I am not sure we can. Our world and our history have been so transformed by the Resurrection, I am not sure we can imagine the experience of those who had no idea the Resurrection was coming and no possible conception of what it would mean.

They had no idea. Jesus had foretold his coming death and coming rise from death. But we know this from gospel texts written after the Resurrection. The gospels make clear that the disciples did not understand Jesus’ foretelling at the time he told them what was ahead (Mark 9:31-32).

Immediately following the Crucifixion, immediately following Jesus’ death, the only choice the disciples would have had for their own processing or acceptance of the event would have been to take the failure onto themselves. Blame themselves. How could we have been so wrong? He was not the Messiah; he was not God. They took him even though he was innocent. They took him and killed him, and his body hung there until they pulled it down.

They had to fault themselves. They had to discredit their previous hope, their hope that the One now slain had been God drawing near. If he was God, then God was dead, and that cannot be. They had to lose their hope, be wrong, or else they would have to face losing God.

Hopelessness was preferable to Godlessness.

They could not know, of course, what was coming.

Compare this to the failure, loss, hurt, collapse, or heartbreak of which you might be in the midst. Within suffering, there is a feel of desolation. A temptation to hopelessness.

What follows is not an end or answer to suffering, but a point we have been given to know.

On the day of the horror of the execution of God, hope would yet be vindicated.

On even that very darkest day, God was ready with the new day that lay ahead.