The morning of Jesus’s resurrection leaves little room for ambiguity.
But Christians must also gaze at the days preceding that glorious resurrection and, freighted with heaving darkness, ask, Why?
The need for resurrection strikes us intuitively, but the reason for Jesus’s pain proves more elusive. To believers, after all, Jesus’s birth to a mortal woman, clothed in earthly flesh, already constituted an irruption of the divine into the banal, the arrival of divinity into a fallen world.
If condescension was already accomplished, why, then, did Jesus need to suffer?
In what follows, I offer first as evocation and then an exploration of the meaning behind Jesus’s suffering.
In the first part of this piece, I am imagining myself to be an unnamed disciple of Jesus on the Friday he died. Because I am a physician, I will imagine myself here as a doctor at the meridian of time.
To begin, my specific imaginations are paired with Morten Lauridsen’s O Nata Lux. You can follow along at this link or below with the timestamps provided.
Next, I will use the thoughts and feelings evoked in the first part of the piece to explore the central question: why would Good Friday be a necessary precursor to Easter Sunday?
[0:01]: Finally, it is finished. The last few days stretched out in endless agony. We watched, mostly from afar, as Jesus—who, just a week ago, rode into Jerusalem treading triumphantly over palm fronds—was taken from one sham trial to another. Neither Pilate, nor Herod, nor any of the Jewish authorities would stay Jesus’s execution. And so, from a short distance away, we wept as he was crowned with thorns, then as he was taken for beating with a leather whip, and finally as his hands and feet were nailed to a cross.
Hour after excruciating hour, we could neither fully watch nor fully hide our faces as we saw him hanging there, pushing himself up on his pierced feet to take each labored breath, and letting his body fall back down again, as the already macerated flesh of his back scraped against the rough-hewn wood. I heard him ask for water—saw him given only vinegar to drink. I watched blood seeping from the wounds at his wrists and feet, but knew that the flow would never be enough to allow death by exsanguination—such a hasty exit would be too merciful for one whose death was intended to be an excruciating torture.
Through it all, I marveled at his calm, his composure—at the majesty of his quiet. There was no cursing God, but only a few exquisitely chosen words of comfort to his comrades in dying, and then the brief appeal to the Father who has seemingly forsaken him.
And then, after the six-hour watch, each minute punctuated repeatedly by those rasping, aching, heaving breaths, his body heaved its last ascent, his lungs exhaled their last breath, and his head hung lifeless atop a spine without strength.
[0:45]: But now, after those moments that seemed to dilate into days, time is slipping ever too quickly away. The Sabbath will start in only four hours—when the sun sets—and the body must be dressed and at least preliminarily prepared for burial before that time. And so, working with the Roman soldiers, we pry loose the nails from his hands and feet, and I am among the few at the foot of the cross who catch his lifeless body as it falls toward the ground. We carry the corpse onto a nearby sheet where we can begin to dress his wounds.
What will never leave me is the weight of the body sagging against our outstretched arms and the cold that begins to crawl over first the limbs and then the trunk as the warmth of life ebbs quickly away. Set against the temperate air of an April afternoon in Jerusalem, that creeping cold prickles my own skin as I feel the concrete reality of death hardening like amber left too long on the limb of a tree.
And in that moment it strikes me again: the unfathomable, comprehensive, and qualitative difference between a dead body and a living man. Even as he heaved against the cross—only moments before now—Jesus was fully alive, inescapably real, and overpoweringly present. Spark lit his eyes, even as his face was composed into a symphony of burden and sorrow. And though racked with nauseating pain, his body was taut with effort, exertion, and terror. life thrummed through every part, in the very act of dying. And now, there is nothing.
No spark.
No energy.
No thrum.
No life.
No meaning.
[1:30]: But certainly, the body cannot be left like this. We cannot inter this tangle of ruined flesh and consider that a proper—even preliminary—burial. And so I take the only tools at my disposal and begin the laborious, malodorous, gritty, and private work of washing Jesus’s wounds.
With a rag dipped over and over and over again in warm water, I first remove the crown of thorns and then take the suds with exquisite gentleness to the pinprick punctate wounds that encircle the skin at his hairline around to the back of his head. Taking care never to enlarge a puncture, I carefully wipe away the drops of blood that have congealed at the opening of each point and work until the skin is clean above his face, and his hair is as free of grime and dirt as I can make it.
Then, wincing, I proceed to the larger wounds: First, I turn to the back—the skin here has been flayed into fine ribbons of exposed muscle, vein, and bone. All order here has been so thoroughly lost that there is little for it but to apply a large linen cloth, smoothing the rough turrets and ravines of these wounds into a surface even enough that we can then roll the body onto the back. And in that act it hits me: this limp body, this thing I must roll onto its back, occupies the same physical space that just hours ago was Jesus—a person woven into a web of relationships—but that now is just this, a body, lifeless, cold, and without spark or poetry. Then, I move to the wounds on his wrists, his palms, and finally at his feet. These are larger, gaping, yawning. The skin is roughly torn, like fabric ripped but not at the seams. In the wrists—especially—I must suppress my own dry-heaving as I can see the exposed median nerve, transected by the nails. I can only imagine—and don’t want to do that—the waves of pain that must have arced and leapt across his arms and through his spine as the nails tore through one of the body’s most sensitive neural highways.
The blood at these wounds is more heavily dried, and the wounds themselves feature skin that has almost entirely lost its integrity. As I try to carefully wipe away the blood, I cannot help but widen the wounds in multiple directions and feel irrationally guilty as if this somehow retroactively deepens his pain.
[2:47]: And then, with the wounds cleaned and the body bathed one careful stroke at a time, we procure clean linens. First fastening the chin to keep it closed, we wrap the body in clean linen sheets—a deathly shroud to complement the swaddling clothes he must have worn after he was born.
As we wrap the stiffened body, the full weight of the loss begins to sink into my soul. Was Jesus not the one who stood at the Mount and told us of a world the meek would inherit? Was it not Jesus who stood at the mouth of a tomb and bade Lazarus arise? Was it not Jesus who with spittle and dust restored sight to the blind man? Was it not Jesus who confounded all those who cared more for station than for mercy, or for rank than for love? And did we not believe we saw in Jesus our coming deliverance—from political captivity, from economic deprivation, if not from something deeper besides?
As these thoughts course through my mind, their attendant feelings race through my soul, and suddenly I find myself biting down on a clean cloth, trying to suppress my sobs. There I am, a grown man, my weeping, convulsing body in a crouch as the laments and cries mount over one another, like waves erupting from a stormy sea.
And yet, after all the things we felt, after all the words he said, after all the miracles he performed, after all the hope he kindled—yet, after all that, even for him, death could not be stayed. We sensed, we hoped, we imagined that such a day would never come—how could it? What would his ministry mean if his life ended? And yet I, a physician, should have known that some things will not bow, even to the most powerful words or the most resplendent miracles. Death does not cower before anyone.
[3:35]: And so, with the body tightly bound in linen cloth, we approach what is a cave hollowed from the side of a hill and, again, feel the lifeless weight of the body pressing down against our arms; we heft the corpse—and with it the hopes we had dared to kindle when this body was still a living, healing, breathing, preaching, walking, loving man—onto a shelf. With the rays of light slanting into the chamber as the sun begins to set behind the western hills, we roll a stone across the front of the aperture, to assure the body will still be there the morning following the Sabbath. The thunk of the rock against the hill it will guard is as thunder announcing the end of Jesus. With eyes now parched of tears, and a voice grown hoarse from sobbing, I gather what remains of my strength, and make my way toward home amidst the gathering chill of night.
As a person, a father, believer, and a doctor, I believe intuitively that we are meant to derive meaning from fixing our gaze on the suffering of Christ. But I confess that the reasons for his suffering strike me as less intuitive. Perhaps we can explore the meaning together.
One potential problem I see comes if we believe that Christ suffered to motivate us to avoid sin. The idea here is that we will look on his suffering and improve our behavior to make him suffer less. While this idea holds some initial appeal, and while feelings of guilt and indebtedness may be effective at generating short-term changes in behavior, they are less effective at changing hearts. And God is about changing hearts through loving relationships. I believe there are truer ways to understand the meaning of Christ's suffering.
But if Christ’s suffering is not meant primarily to spur us to better behavior—then how does grappling with his suffering bring us meaning and spiritual succor?
I would conceive of that meaning in at least four ways.
First, we can recognize this: His particular experience with suffering was both unique and apparently senseless. His torture and death could not have corresponded in any exact way to the suffering of any other. This portion of his grief was random, apparently unnecessary, and, at least as best I can gather, unconnected to any higher purpose or cause.
But perhaps that is precisely what makes it matter—because some of our most intense and atomizing suffering is the suffering without rhyme or reason, the consequence of someone else’s bad decisions, the fallout of actions we never chose and for which the universe gives no evidence of a grand scheme.
Perhaps Jesus’s suffering teaches us this: that some pain has meaning, but not all.
Second: Jesus’s suffering at the hands of the Romans matters because by becoming acquainted with the tyranny of meaningless suffering, Jesus has excavated within himself a crater into which the nectar of empathy could be poured. An example from my profession illustrates the point: medical oncologist Mark Lewis decided a number of years ago to be very public about his diagnosis of a rare tumor of the pancreas which led him, eventually, to have a massive abdominal rewiring surgery called a “whipple procedure.”
Dr. Lewis has shared that every time he is open (for example, on Twitter/X) about his diagnosis and surgery, he is overwhelmed with patients who want to come and have him as their oncologist—not because of his research, or diagnostic acumen, but because he knows how they feel. This surprising (but unsurprising) finding comes precisely because when we are suffering, we desperately long to know that someone knows how we feel. In subjecting himself to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” Jesus was demonstrating his dedication to becoming the fully comprehending Christ we need him to be.
His pain was the price he paid to be able, as Alma beautifully says, to succor us.
And, third: Christ’s suffering matters because only in confronting it can we grant to Easter the full majesty of its miracle, the full sweep of its victory, the full sweetness of its triumph over despair.
Before we can fully savor the victory of Easter, we must learn to let hard things have their own gravity, their own time and space. After all, before it was empty, the tomb was full.
The concrete reality of Jesus’s suffering matters because most of us will spend time—days, months, years, a lifetime—staring at our own unjust pain, our own unwarranted suffering, or our own empty and echoing moments of doubt. There will be periods where our best laid plans seem to come to naught or when our noblest efforts turn to ashes in our hands.
In those moments, we need to know that Jesus lived as a fully mortal man—subject to hunger, pain, longing, betrayal, and sadness. Then, we need to realize that the bleak sunset of Friday and the emptiness of Saturday were just as real as the victory of Easter Sunday. The reality of all that preceded the resurrection teaches us that when we feel abandoned, or betrayed, or alone, or forgotten, we are not the first to walk that road. By recognizing this reality, we can learn that the gospel of Jesus Christ is not an empty fairy tale filled with flimsy promises, but rather, the gospel is the guarantee from someone who also suffered terribly that light will vanquish darkness, that love will overcome enmity, and that hope will conquer despair.
And that brings us to the final, most paradoxical, and most transformative reason that grappling with the reality of Jesus’s suffering matters: because doing so transforms us, birthing within us a love like his. Pondering on Jesus’s sacrifice will eventually teach us this great truth: the point of understanding his sacrifice is not to become acquainted, per se, with the specific contours of his agony. Rather, spending time to understand Christ’s suffering teaches us how dearly we are loved. And, as is always true with God’s love, our own recognition and appreciation of his love catalyzes within us a divine love of our own.
Scripture teaches us that we wished the agony could stop, that he felt it so deeply that it caused “myself, even God, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit, and would that I might not drink the bitter cup.” But, his desire notwithstanding, Jesus finished the work of the atonement. In so doing, it is as if he is saying to each of us:
I see the cruel world in which you live, where the best of you too often are subject to the worst, where even those who seek to do right inherit suffering at the hands of those who blithely do wrong. But I will not run from this world. I will enter into it and I will brave the worst of it. I will embody my perfect love for you by stepping into the breach of a fallen kingdom and stand together with you athwart the crush of despair and pain. I will not simply love you from afar—I will love you by becoming one of you.
Thus, I believe we can conclude that we are meant to grapple with the suffering of Jesus for this transcendent reason: because the measure of our understanding of his suffering is the measure of our understanding of his love. The week leading up to Easter offers to us a story defined by tragedy and betrayal, etched in suffering and agony. But while that story involves traitors and nails, crosses and stones, thieves and disciples, before it is about anything else it is about this: God’s love is the single, central, immutable, shining fact of the universe—the lustrous reality that even all the suffering and torture and agony of Holy Week could not dim.
It is in the act of encountering the weeping God—whether as beheld by Enoch, or as seen prostrate in Gethsemane, or hanging limply from a cross—that we can be left stunned and speechless at the majesty and mystery of God’s overwhelming love. And it is that recognition that ushers the love of Jesus and our Heavenly Parents into our own hearts, and through us to the wide and waiting world.
And so, on Good Friday, I turn once again to O Nata Lux to recognize and remember the light and love made flesh.
O Nata lux de lumine,
Jesu redemptor saeculi,
Dignare Clemens supplicum
Laudes preseque sumere.
Qui carne quondam contegi
Dignatus es pro perditis,
Nos membera confer effici
Tui beati corporis.
O Light born of Light,
Jesus, redeemer of the world,
With loving-kindness deign to receive
Suppliant praise and prayer.
Thou who once
Deigned to be clothed in flesh
For the sake of the lost,
Grant us to be members of thy blessed body.
Tyler Johnson is a Wayfare Senior Editor and an oncologist and Clinical Assistant Professor at Stanford University.
 | A guest post by
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Thank you Tyler for again providing the words and feeling to focus my mind on the stunning wonder of God’s love.
Music emotional, words visual, heart broken, tears falling, gratitude infinite! Suffering incomprehensible, death conquered, Light born, Love divine! Hope eternal! 🩷☀️