A Strange Title for This Day

We call this Friday - good.

I recall a comment by a person who challenged this tradition of calling the day of Jesus’ crucifixion a good day. She told me that there was enough betrayal, denial, violence, bloodshed and death in the world. The idea of coming together in a church to hear of all this as it was heaped on Jesus was too much for her. She could not hear of it without coming to tears, or feeling a combination of outrage and depression.

From Other Traditions

But still we call this Friday Good Friday, as Christians in the English speaking world have done for centuries. Our Spanish speaking fellow Christians speak of this day as Viernos Santo - "holy Friday." The Germans speak of it as Kar Freitag - literally "the Friday of pure gold." Swedes know it as Lang F…