Good Friday Revisited

A high school classmate posted a question on my Facebook page asking seriously why we would refer to the day when we commemorate the suffering and death of Christ as 'Good' Friday. I was glad for the invitation to comment, and did so briefly, because I was using my iPhone. The context is that we don't celebrate Good Friday as though we (well, mainly our Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters) weren't going to sing, just two days later, "Christ has risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tomb bestowing life." Just because a dear friend said that I should put this on my blog, here it is (with all my egregious spelling errors corrected):

Great question. In fact, this day is focused not so much on the physical/mental/emotional suffering of Christ, but more on how Christ, by his voluntary suffering and death engages sin and death in mortal combat, conquering death by death and vanquishing the fear associated with the suffering of human life by his own suffering. In a very rough analogy, this is the day when the only true terrorists, sin and death, experienced the shock and awe of the Passion and Death of the deathless Son of God. It is, therefore, a day of extreme joy for us, who were the prisoners of sin and death, and are witnessing the destruction of our captors and the beginning of our liberation. In some ways, the mood might be called a grim jubilation, especially as we are aware of the lengths to which our Savior had to go to win the victory for us, but as another commentator has pointed out, Good may not be a big enough word for this day; it could seem like an
understatement of (literally) cosmic proportions!