It is Friday.

It is Friday.

Good Friday, which is a phrase that obviously the church has applied to the day only in hindsight,

only years after when we realize just how great and good this day is in one sense,

but in another sense within the story itself, this is the day of days.

This is Christ's D day, unlike any that any man or woman has ever faced in the history of the world.

It is Friday, sometime in the night or early Friday morning, perhaps one or two a.m. Jesus Christ is arrested in the garden.

He's taken by soldiers and beaten. They bring him before the Jewish

Council, the Sanhedron, who try him in their own fashion complete

with false witnesses.

And then he's taken to Pilot and then to Herod and then back to pilot and finally he is taken to Golgotha and crucified.

And one of the things that absolutely boggles my mind is the courage with which Christ face all of this.

Let's pick up the story in Luke 23.

As they let him away they seized Simon from Sireen, who was on his

way in from the country, and put the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus. A large number of people followed him, including

women who mourned and wailed for him. Jesus turned and said to them daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me. Weep for yourselves and for your

children. For the time will come when you will say, Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never

nursed. Then they will say to the mountains fall on us and to the hills cover us.

For if men do these things when the tree is green,

what will happen when it is dry?

Whoa, this is such a sober moment. I mean Christ is already deeply,

deeply tormented. You've probably seen some film depiction of this of some sort, the whipping, the

...