Good Friday is an Unresolved Chord

A Musical Analogy

If you ever hear someone pick up a guitar and strum a dissonant chord, you’d be forgiven for wondering why such things exist in music. Dissonant chords don’t sound very good. But our music in enriched because dissonant chords create tension before their resolution. Taken in the context of a song, they can create richer, more satisfying music, but this only happens when that tension is finally resolved with a consonant (nice sounding) chord. Musicians describe that transition as ‘coming home.’ Imagine that you’re playing music and someone stops the playback at the note just before you come home at the end of the song. That moment, as long as it lasted, would feel tense and disorienting. That’s what Good Friday is for the disciples.

The Unbearable Tension

Good Friday is a day with a misleading name. Because for Jesus’ disciples, the day was undoutedly the very worst day they had ever had. On a personal level, they all lost their friend and mentor. On a professional level, they had all assumed Jesus was the next king and they would be his most trusted advisors, but now their ambitions seem like a cruel joke. But Good Friday is also a crisis of faith for Jesus’ disciples. Their people have been conquered by a king who calls himself Lord, the same word used to describe God in the language of scripture. God had promised a return of the king, and that King was Jesus, but somehow Caesar had gotten the better of Jesus and God’s great rescue plan for the Jewish people seems to have died along with Jesus. Maybe Caesar was Lord after all. If ever there was a time to despaire, this was it.

But of course, we know how this story ends. But on Friday and Saturday, a successful resolution to this story seems an absurd possibility. Their life, from now on, promises to be one large crescendo of dissonance because their whole understanding of reality has come unraveled. For the time when Jesus was dead, the dissonant chord was playing loud in the background with no end in sight.

Believing Jesus’ Promise

But Jesus had warned them that this was how it would go. Mark’s gospel, for example has three separate times when Jesus explicitly says he’ll be rejected, killed and rise again. We shake our heads at the disciples. How could they be so dull? How could they doubt Jesus would rise again after he promised them that that’s how the story would end? But everything in their experience tells them that they’ve just backed the wrong horse. In their world dead people stay dead. The greatest kings have no power at all once they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. Jesus’ promises notwithstanding, the prospect of God’s victory looks impossible. Even though we know that a few days later, God did the impossible.

The disciple’s experience of living in the dissonance is an experience with which we can relate. We follow a Lord and claim that he has all authority. He can heal the sick, feed the hungry, transform the human heart and, yes, even raise the dead. But, in our darkest moments, if we’re really honest, maybe we don’t always feel like we’re moving from glory to glory. Maybe deep down inside we feel like we and this world are so broken that we doubt God’s ability to set all things right. My world and my life sometimes look, pretty convincingly, like God is losing, like our hope has been misplaced.

But the Good Friday story reminds us that God has been here before. He’s been placed in an impossible situation and, yet, he overcame. Resurrection Sunday ended the unbearable dissonance the disciples experience. Like the disciples, we too are heirs to a promise that God will set all things right. And so as we live in this moment, this hour, this millenium, of dissonance, will we, like the disciples, doubt that God can resolve all that ails us. Or will we see their story, and their testimony as the source of faith that no matter how dissonant our lives may seem and how long they’ve been there that God will strike the final chord, resolve the conflict, and bring us home.