Sinclair B. Ferguson

And today is what we call Good Friday.

I don't think we know for sure how it came to be called that.

Most of us have heard at least one sermon on what makes Good Friday good, with the answer being that on that day the greatest good since the creation of the world was accomplished.

But there's another tradition that suggests the origin lies in the Old English, God's Friday.

This day commemorates the work of God for our salvation.

But did anyone who participated in the events of that day think of it at the time as a good Friday?

It certainly didn't seem like that for any of the people we've been talking about this week, for Judas Iscariot, or Peter, or Pontius Pilate, or at the time for Simon of Cyrene.

Nor for others.

Mary was losing her son.

John was watching his best friend die.

The Roman centurion might have looked back on it as a turning point in his life, maybe, but we can't be sure.

Even the religious leaders who engineered our Lord's crucifixion had all kinds of anxieties about the day.

After all, they'd been trying to avoid Jesus being executed at the time of the Feast of the Passover.

But there was one man for whom the day started as the worst day in his life.

but ended not only as the last day, but as the best day.

In the morning, he had been dragged along with two others from his prison cell and forced to carry the instrument of his own crucifixion.

From around midday, he began to experience the agony of crucifixion, a torturous form of execution that actually led the great Roman orator Cicero to say the very word should be absent from the lips of a Roman citizen.

Sometimes it could take days for a man to die, ultimately by asphyxiation.

And maybe all this man could hope for was that since Passover was about to begin, the execution squad would have mercy and do something to hasten his end.

At first he had the strength to curse, to curse anything and everything.