What Good Friday Teaches Us

Picture the scene. A crowd of roughly fifty people moving up a hill. Three condemned men. Soldiers who couldn't care less - they're already dividing up the clothing, tossing dice, laughing. And somewhere in that crowd, a father who can barely keep himself together. His son had been healed by the man in the middle. And now that man - the one who had done nothing wrong, who had only ever brought good news - was being marched to his death.

What does the man in the middle do with all of this? What is going through his mind?

That's the question Luke 23 forces us to sit with. Not just as a historical curiosity, but as a mirror. Because how Jesus responds to the worst day of his life has everything to say about how we're supposed to respond to ours.

He Dies Like a Criminal - On Purpose
One of the most striking details in Luke's account is how ordinary it all was. Jesus didn't get a special execution. He carried his cross like every other condemned man. He was killed at the same place where ordinary criminals were put to death - a hillside outside the city walls, visible from the road, designed to send a message to anyone passing by: don't cross Rome.

We've softened this over centuries. We put the cross on necklaces, let kids color it in Sunday school, hang it on walls. That's not wrong - but we should never forget what it was. It was an instrument of execution. A first-century electric chair. The fact that this brutal object became the central symbol of the Christian faith tells you everything about what God was doing that day.

"Jesus dies like an ordinary criminal - and that was always the point."

He didn't hover above the humiliation. He stepped fully into it. He had no skin on his back. His beard had been pulled out. A crown of thorns was pressed into his skull. He was bleeding from his face before he ever reached the hill. And when the weight of the crossbeam became too much, the soldiers grabbed a stranger from the crowd - Simon of Cyrene - and forced him to carry it the rest of the way.

This wasn't an accident or a plan gone sideways. This was the plan.

The First Impulse Was Forgiveness
Now here is where Luke's account becomes almost impossible to process.
The soldiers are mocking him. The religious leaders are scoffing - "He saved others; let him save himself if he's really the Messiah." One of the criminals hanging right next to him joins in the ridicule: "Aren't you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" The soldiers put up a sign meant to embarrass every Jewish person watching: This is the King of the Jews.

And Jesus's response to all of it?

"Father, forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing."
- Luke 23:34

Not silence. Not gritted teeth. Not a promise of future judgment. Forgiveness. Active, outward, immediate forgiveness - directed at the very people causing his agony.

This isn't Jesus ignoring the injustice. It's Jesus choosing, in real time, to release his right to hold onto anger. Earlier in his ministry, in what Luke calls the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus had taught his followers: "Love your enemies, do what is good... For the Father is gracious to the ungrateful and the evil." Here on the cross, he's not just teaching it. He's living it at the worst possible moment.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: when you imagine Jesus looking at your life right now, what's your gut reaction? Is it love? Or is your first instinct to think he's disappointed, frustrated, tired of you repeating the same mistakes?

If Jesus's first impulse toward the people killing him was to forgive them, it's worth asking whether we've fully believed that his first impulse toward us is love - not a conditional, exasperated love, but the same love that spoke forgiveness from a cross.

An Exchange That Changes Everything
One of the criminals hanging beside Jesus - the one who had not been mocking him - makes one of the most remarkable confessions in all of Scripture. He rebukes the other criminal: "Don't you fear God? We're getting what we deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong." And then he turns to Jesus: "Remember me when you come into your kingdom."

Jesus's answer is immediate: "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise."

No baptism. No years of discipleship. No track record of good works. Just a dying man, at the end of everything, turning toward Jesus - and being received completely.

This is what theologians sometimes call the Great Exchange. Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 5: God made Jesus - who never sinned - to become sin for us, so that in him we might be counted righteous. Our failures, our disobedience, our mess - transferred to Jesus. His perfect, innocent life - transferred to us.

"Only perfect people make it to heaven. We have the perfect life of Christ - which is why we will enter."

It's not that our good deeds outweigh our bad ones. Scripture is clear that they don't - that all of us have fallen short. The question isn't whether we deserve it. We don't. The question is whether we'll receive what Jesus already accomplished.

He Died Trusting God With What Came Next
Luke tells us what Jesus's final words were: "Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit." It's a line from Psalm 31 - a psalm of trust in the middle of suffering. Jesus chose those words deliberately.

Think about what that trust actually required. Jesus didn't raise himself from the dead. The Father raised him. Which means that in dying, Jesus had to fully let go - had to trust that God would act, even across three days of silence and darkness. He had done his part. Now he had to trust.

That's not a passive thing. That's one of the hardest acts of faith in the story. And it's the same faith we're invited into. We don't know exactly what happens between now and resurrection. But we trust the same Father. We entrust our spirits to the same hands.

The Question Is Which Group We're In
Luke is a careful writer, and in his account of the crucifixion, you can spot four distinct groups responding to Jesus's death.

Mourn: There are those who mourn - the women beating their chests, the crowds who went home shaken.
Watch: There are those who simply watch - bystanders keeping their distance, including most of the disciples.
Scoff: There are those who scoff - the leaders, the soldiers, the one criminal.
Confess: And then there are the two most unlikely people who actually confess - the dying criminal, and the Roman centurion who watched Jesus die and said, quietly, "This man really was righteous."

The people who were supposed to get it - the religious leaders, the disciples - mostly didn't. The people nobody expected to get it - a criminal, a pagan soldier - did.

As Easter approaches, the same four options are still available. We can grieve the story. We can watch from a safe distance and let the week go by. We can dismiss it. Or we can confess it - that this actually happened, that it actually means something, that the man in the middle actually died for us and actually rose.

Forgiveness Isn't Just for the Cross
The passage doesn't leave us as spectators. Jesus's first impulse was love - and that's supposed to become our first impulse too. Not as a rule to follow, but as a natural outflow of understanding what was done for us.

Living unoffendably - releasing anger rather than stockpiling it - is what it looks like when the cross actually changes you. It changes how you see the neighbor with the yard sign you disagree with. It changes how you handle the coworker who gets under your skin. It changes how you respond to the people in your family who are hardest to love.
It's like putting on 3D glasses, in a way. Everything is the same, but you see it differently. The depth is there that you couldn't see before.

Jesus looked at the people executing him and said, "Father, forgive them." If he could do that, we can forgive the person who wronged us. Not because they deserve it. But because we have been forgiven - fully, freely, finally - and forgiveness changes everything about how we move through the world.

Something to Try This Week
Is there a person, a situation, or something from your past that you've been holding onto? Take a moment to open your hands - literally or in prayer - and release it. Not because the anger isn't real, but because you've been forgiven far more than you've ever been wronged.