In the searing experience of Good Friday, a suffering of unimaginable magnitude engulfed the life, body and soul of Jesus of Nazareth.

To lift a pen for describing the cross on paper or a paint brush to portray it on canvass is to invite an epic failure of human expression.

One verse I included at the center of our responsive reading in Good Friday worship is the witness of Simon Peter. Having felt his own soul shattered into pieces at the sight of his Savior’s suffering eyes, Peter knew as few men could, how bitter the Friday of Christ’s Passion had been.

Writing a quarter century later to followers of Jesus facing increasing threats of persecution, Peter reminded them that “by his stripes we are healed.” (I Peter 2:24). 

The word he used for stripes conveys the image of a massive wound, so brutal that it reveals a depth of agony beyond what a human mind can grasp.

You’re invited. Children are welcome. Guests are welcome.

We honor Jesus of Nazareth in humble awareness that our songs and words and feelings and voices are tiny compared to the suffering of Golgotha.

But Mary, the mother of Jesus, his beloved apostle John and women from Galilee who had seen and wept along the winding narrow streets of old Jerusalem as the ebbing strength of a tortured Messiah drained slowly and steadily om his whipped and beaten body. They watched Roman guards scoffing as their hired hands pounded spikes into his wrists and ankles and hoisted the Master’s body high on a Roman cross. They heard his cries of agony ascending in anticipation of that ultimate darkness of his separation from the Father, when he as the Lamb of God slain for our sins gave up his spirit with his final cry: “It is finished.”

For Simon Peter, in the pain of his own betrayal and for companions who had fled, thunder and lightning over Golgotha and the city must have seemed the end of the End.

But in Christ our Lord, the finished atoning sacrifice puts a new meaning in the familiar phrase “The End.”

It’s the end of the need for sin’s penalty to be paid.

Christ paid in full what none of us could pay for the damages that SIN has caused in all of our lives and in this world.

His death is “the atoning sacrifice for our sins” as I John 2:2 explains.

We give thanks, for all the goodness of God displayed in this day of remembrance. We sing of His love together and welcome you to join us.