I have a letter I've kept over the years, that I'd like to read to you. A woman wrote it to the Milwaukee Journal during the lenten season, a number of years ago, when I was interning in Wisconsin. I like to keep it around because I think it addresses eloquently, yet very simply, the question of Good Friday. It is a caustic letter, offensive in some respects. Anyway, she says in part:

Good Friday stands as a question mark in the history of the world. It stands as a question wherever and whenever suffering and injustice rears its ugly head. It is the question an unbelieving world addresses to God: What kind of a God is he? What kind of God would allow Good Friday to happen?

We are not unfamiliar with Good Friday, are we? Most of us have experienced it in some way - the senselessness of it, the cruelty of it, its apparent meaninglessness. This woman describes pretty well what Good Friday is like. The Bible describes the many horror stories of Good Friday. That's a good part of what the Bible is all about - all the Good Fridays of history. What happens to Jesus is merely a summation, a drawing together, of what Good Friday is all about.

On Good Friday, a man comes to our earthly scene - a man unlike all others we have known - a man, the scripture says, in whom there is no guile. He is the perfect embodiment of all that is right and good: perfectly obedient, perfectly trusting, perfectly loving. A man with the common touch. A man who always has time to stop and play with children. A gentle man, one our heart immediately goes out to. And this man is given over to other men - men so evil they must be moved by Satan himself. They torture him, mentally and physically. They flog him and spit on him. Then they lead him out to the city garbage dump, drive spikes through his hands and feet, and hang him up to die on a rough wooden cross. There, he slowly suffocates to death, the splinters digging into his raw flesh each time he rises to try to breathe. Below, men shout curses at him, and crack jokes, and he hangs in anguish.

And God - his father - refuses to help. He refuses to life a finger. Even when, in a tortured petition, Jesus begs his father for mercy - God refuses. He stands by silently, never lifting a finger to help.

The question that Good Friday raises is - what kind of a God is this? This is a story that makes us cringe with revulsion. What savagery! What a mockery of justice - of all that is right and holy! What kind of a father would allow such a thing to happen. If something like that happened to my child, I would move heaven and earth to help him. Is God that insensitive? That uncaring? That brutal? How can he propose to tell us that he is a loving God, and allow that to happen to his own son?

Yes - that woman is right. The Bible is filled to overflowing with Good Friday. It's chock full of stories about our inhumanity to one another, our oppression, our sadistic self-glorification. The Bible is realistic about our world, and all the Good Fridays it contains. In a society that thinks its outgrown these things, that believes that "every day and in every way, we're getting better and better," the Bible strips off the veneer, it reminds us what we are really like under our thin coat of respectability. It describes in gory detail how we work - what motivates us.

It gets to the core of why Good Friday happens - of what makes Good Friday, "Good Friday." We all want power. Good Friday shows us what our human definition of power is all about. Power to destroy. Power to coerce. Power to kill. We all want success, and are willing to sacrifice others on it's altar. There were a lot of successful people involved in making Good Friday. And security. Caiphus was willing to give Jesus up for the sake of the nation. Pilate was willing to give him up for the sake of his career. Security played a big part in making Good Friday into "Good Friday."

Good Friday signals the triumph of the strong over the weak, the rich over the poor, the successful over the failures. Jesus loved the poor, the powerless and the oppressed. Every child in Sunday School knows that. He loved them so much that he identified himself as one of them. And so he bore the consequences they always bear in the world, as those forces crushed him. He bore it. Our sin focused in on him on Good Friday, and did to him, what it always does to the last and the least. And there we begin to understand what Good Friday is really about.

Is God sitting in heaven laughing at us? Was is a game to send his Son down to us, to let us kill him, so he can throw us all in hell? Or didn't he care at all? What kind of God does Good Friday reveal?

There is a statement in the scriptures that says, simply, of Jesus: "In him the godhead dwells fully." Jesus said, "I and the Father are one. He who sees me has seen the Father." If you understand Jesus, you understand the heart of God. Jesus came as one oppressed and afflicted, one who had no power as we think of it. He didn't meet with success here, as we think of it. In the end, everyone deserts him. No one believes him. He never has a real home; death hides in wait for him around every corner. That ma; not sound like God to us, but it is exactly here where Jesus reflects the heart of God. It is not a laughing God we hear as Jesus bows his head to die on Good Friday. Rather, as he dies, the sky grows dark and the earth heaved. It was the sound of God's heart breaking. What we hear on Good Friday is the sound of a broken heart.

It is our definition of power and success and richness that are wrong. It is our willingness to sacrifice anyone on the altar of our self-centeredness that is wrong. God's power is not that of a cosmic bully, but the power of an unending, limitless love. His love can overcome any boundary - even the boundaries of sin and death. So nothing can separate us from his love. That is real power.

Success for him isn't the adulation or adoration of the crowds; it's not having everyone cow tow to him. Success, for him, means that there is always a tomorrow for us. He has ensured it. Even when we fail miserably. So we don't have to be concerned about our failing bodies, our failing minds, our failing lives, as if everything depends on us. He is faithful, and there is always a tomorrow for us.

The end of our sin-filled, self-centered life is death. That is what Good Friday is all about. We have rejected life, and so we are always blundering on toward death. But when we have done our worst; when human strength and human definitions fail and death seems to reign over us - it is right at that point that God takes over. It's there that we see him most powerfully at work. Right there, he draws us out of the grave we have dug for ourselves, and gives us the promise of new life. After the world has done its worst, when everything seems settled, and death has proclaimed its victory - that's when God steps in and raises from the dead. That's when the story of the resurrection begins.

Yes, there is a Good Friday for Jesus. There is a Good Friday for each of us. The world will have its day. Because of our sin, we suffer and we die. Yet even then, we can look ahead with surety and hope .... and know that Easter is coming.