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But what else was there to do on Good Friday? Already, on this spring morning, as I was descending the hills toward the river, Jesus was beginning his climb to Golgotha. What else was there to do? For the women who followed him, "looking on afar off," for those standing beneath the cross, what was there left to do?

Nothing. Quite obviously just nothing. The soldier who confessed, "Truly this man was the Son of God," and the one who pierced his Savior's side with the spear, both were equally helpless there, I suddenly saw. Because Good Friday is the day when you can do nothing. Bewailing and lamenting your manifold sins does not in itself make up for them. Scouring your soul in a frenzy of spring cleaning only sterilizes it; it does not give it life. On Good Friday, finally, we are all, mourners and mockers alike, reduced to the same impotence. Someone else is doing the terrible work that gives life to the world. Good Friday is the day we can do nothing at all.

No matter that I repudiated my old transgressions. On Good Friday, all one's fine feelings count for nothing. If there was to be anything new about life after today, it had to come from some source beyond myself. That is why there was nothing more to do on Good Friday. Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. His blood and his righteousness.

I passed the intersection at Carlos with its one blinking, yellow light and crossed the bridge over the pipeline that carries the coal slurry to the plant a few miles further on. From there the road bent northward to cross the river.

As I broke out of the pines and into the fertile bottomland, the spring again assaulted me. The land below, emerging from the tendrils of morning fog, was a tangle of luxuriant fertility. Clouds of pink and white, effulgent enough to inebriate the soberest soul, lured one's line of vision into the darker trees. Acres of bluebonnets streaked up the red clay banks of the river. The earth, on this Good Friday, cast forth its life, heedless of the sacrifice that sustained it. Its callous, regardless life, sucked from the source it can never repay, never replenish. Continually drawing on the death of its Savior to live. Just like me.

This article originally appeared in the March 17, 1989 issue of Christianity Today.

Virginia Stem Owens is author of Daughters of Eve(NavPress) and Looking for Jesus (Westminster John Knox). She lives in Huntsville, Texas.

Read our other articles in The Great Reversal:

Maundy Thursday | By Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Holy Saturday | By Eugene H. Peterson

Easter Sunday | By Philip Yancey

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44