Just as every Sunday is for Christians a reminder of Easter and the resurrection, every Friday is a reminder of Good Friday and the crucifixion.

At Morning Prayer every Friday, we pray:

Collect for Fridays

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen. (BCP 99)

Just as we live in the light of the Resurrection, we walk in the way of the cross.

Fr. Richard Rohr says:

I believe that the Mystery of the Cross is saying that the pattern of transformation unto God, the pattern that connects, the life that God offers us is always death transformed. The only pattern is the pattern of death and resurrection. We submit to it with trust because Jesus did.

Rohr calls this One Big Pattern “transformative dying.”

On the other side of that dying, whether it is physical illness and death, or the “daily dying to self” of the prayer book, or admitting our powerlessness over our sin, on the other side of that dying we find the truth.

The American author Reynolds Price says that the Gospel of John can be compressed down to a single sentence, “the sentence mankind craves from stories”:

The Maker of all things loves and wants me.

The Maker of all things loves and wants me — loves and wants every single one of us, loves and wants all of us so much that God was willing not only to endure the limitations of becoming human, but also to endure the suffering and death that is our lot in life.

Because he died and rose again, we too can experience “transformative dying,” can claim our small part of the one big pattern.

That’s why we call this Friday “Good.”

Collect for Fridays

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen. (BCP 99)