When Darkness Feels Familiar

A Good Friday Reflection

There is something almost unbearable about arriving at Good Friday in a year like this one.

The news carries the weight of wars… cities reduced to rubble, children displaced, bodies counted in the thousands. And closer to home, many of us carry a quieter grief: the Church, the one we love and uphold, has repeatedly been confronted with scandal, division, and toxicity.

We come to the cross, then, not as strangers to suffering, but as people deeply wrestling with darkness.

And perhaps that is exactly where Good Friday meets us.

This is the strange mercy we find on this Good Friday.

It does not offer us an escape from darkness. It offers us a God who has been in the darkness and knows the way through it.

So on this Good Friday, may we sit before the cross as our seat of counsel. Isaiah promised a Wonderful Counselor, and here, in the One Who Bled, that promise is most fully kept. Before the cross there are no debates, no divisions, no shallow answers. Only Him.

The One who was rich, yet became poor. The One who clothed Himself with our humanity and dignified it forever. His humility is staggering. He brought dignity to women in a culture that refused to honor them as fully human. He held the leper in his arms. He restores those who deny Him and reveals Himself to those who doubt Him. He honors the lowly and humbles the proud. And He loves without limit or boundary.

As we observe Him, may we become like Him.

The cross does not stand apart from the mess of this world. It stands inside it… as God's answer from within.

As we hold in remembrance the One Who Bled, as we gaze upon Jesus on the cross of suffering, may we learn not to be afraid of the darkness, but to meet Him within it.

We are not yet at Sunday.

But we are not alone in the dark.