Good Friday is not an easy day on which to preach, nor is what happened on Good Friday easy to explain. Many thoughtful Christians have a difficult time understanding how this very bad day in the life of Christ has become for Christians a good day. What's more, many find it perplexing to say that Jesus died for their sins because he died some 2,000 years before they were born. Then perhaps most perplexing of all are those theories of atonement that come to us in the New Testament, theories steeped in a popular culture light-years removed from ours.
So at the outset, it is well for us to confess that there is a profound mystery about this Friday called good, a mystery that has, at least in part, been generated and fostered by those very thought-forms that were intended to make clear wha…