A youngster in Sunday School asked the pastor, "If Jesus died on Friday, why do we call it good?"

It seems contrary to reason to call this day Good Friday, when congregations around the world remember Jesus' death with black and an empty chancel. Images like these recount the day: forsaken, scorn, thorns, despised, grief, sorrow, wounded, tears, darkness, and death. How can we use a word like good in the same breath? What good can come from Jesus' death on the cross on a day long ago on a hill called "the place of the skull"?

Several years ago Granger Westberg wrote his classic book Good Grief. He explained how grief was a normal and necessary human experience at a time of loss. Healthy people engage their sorrow and work through it in such a way so as to emerge from their valley of shad…