Good Friday: The Cross is God’s Victory Over Death
It has been said that every good story is about love and death. Write a novel or song or direct a film—but neglect these themes, and you’re missing the only things that really matter. What we long for most is love. What we fear most is death. We know innately that without dealing honestly with love and death a story won’t touch the deepest places in human life.
But it’s not just storytellers who know about the ultimacy of love and death. Historians and philosophers realize it, too. The French atheist philosopher Luc Ferry admitted that the only purpose of philosophy was to determine how to live in light of our impending death.
It should be no surprise to us then that the great act of God in history, the crucifixion of the Son of God, is the most tragic death and the most majestic display of love in any story ever told. The great descent from heaven of the One through whom all things were made, who came down as a child, who came down into poverty, who came down to love outcasts, to bear the sins of the world, who came down to be betrayed and innocently condemned, who came down to suffer abuse and torture. Down, down, down. At last, down to the lowest point: the grave. “And [Joseph] rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away” (Matthew 27:60).
But here at the lowest point is a wonderful irony. It’s that word “tomb.” Ask any Christian what the word “tomb” makes them think of and the answer will not be the cross. It won’t be Good Friday. It will always be Easter. It will always be an empty tomb.
The emphasis on Jesus’s body (twice in the story of Jesus’s burial in Matthew 27:55–61) highlights this marvelous truth: God has reversed the curse of death. Not just the soul, but the body can be raised! The whole curse can be lifted! The promise of the gospel is that for those who belong to him, God will do for them in the future what he has already done for Jesus in the past. God’s answer to death is the promise that we will live in renewed bodies in his loving presence for endless ages, without sin, without suffering.
The biblical hope is so wild that no religious leader except Jesus has ever dared to promise such a thing. A sage might tell you how your soul can reach enlightenment. A guru might give you advice for cleaning up your life. Only the resurrected Son of God has the audacity to offer you the reversal of death itself. And only he has the credibility to do so. He has already plunged to the bottom of the black abyss. He has already been crushed by the immeasurable weight of human sin. Satan has already assaulted him with his whole arsenal of evil.
The cross is the ultimate story about the deep things that really matter—the ultimate struggle of love and death. And just as it seemed all was lost, Jesus won.
O the deep, deep love of Jesus,
Vast unmeasured, boundless, free!
Rolling as a mighty ocean
In its fullness over me!
Underneath me, all around me,
Is the current of Thy love
Leading onward, leading homeward
To Thy glorious rest above!