Storm clouds rolled in fast this morning in Grand Rapids, swallowing the sky whole. The wind kicked up, wrapping us in a heavy shroud of darkness. Violet was lost in her book until she gasped, “Look!”—just as lightning cracked the heavens open. Rain hammered the windows, and though it was 10 a.m., it felt like midnight. We sat in my office and stared out at the sky, feeling small in all the right ways.
The storm’s raw edge matched the day. Good Friday. Golgotha’s shadow looms, and this foreboding weather, wild and heavy, feels right. Good Friday is exponentially good because it means Christ has accomplished salvation. But it is also a day of soberness because it’s our sin that put him there. That weighs, and it should.
The chapters about Jesus’s last week filled my reading this week. And though familiar, the words “to the end” reverberated in my heart and mind for days.
“Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”
To the end.
Jesus didn’t waver. Not when He grieved over Jerusalem’s rebellion. Not when Judas betrayed Him or Peter denied Him. He didn’t strike back as soldiers pressed thorns into His scalp or cast lots for His clothes. When they taunted, “Save yourself, prove you’re God,” He stayed nailed in humiliation. Through three hours of darkness, forsaken by the Father, He held fast. And then He laid down His life.
A friend of mine had an MRI last week. As he laid there, still as possible, he struggled to control his breathing and had to will himself to continue through the panic and claustrophobia. In his hand lay a button - he could push it at any time and they’d stop the MRI. Relief was only a slight movement of a finger away. But that meant starting all over again. “I was so close to pushing that button,” he shared, ‘so close.” The experience was suffocating and a battle of the mind and will.
A pathway to relief, to the ending of anguish. It’s hard to resist. Jesus listened to the crowds — they were taunting him to come done and prove he was God. He could have easily done that 1,000 different ways. It could have been over instantly. But he stayed, he subjected himself — King of Creation to fallen creatures. His determination to accomplish salvation was stronger than any temptation to escape the agony, humiliation, and suffering.
For three hours, oppressive silence covered that hill broken only by jeers and gasps of onlookers and the labored breaths of the dying. And then finally the cry, “It is finished” lifted through the air at Golgotha. Not surrender, but a declaration of victory that shook the earth itself.
He loved them to the end.
“To the end, Vivi,” I murmured to Violet as we maneuvered the rain-soaked roads all the way home.
To the end, so we can be new creations in Him.