Much of my spiritual formation, as I’ve said before in this space, came through Reformed University Fellowship. Not least among the things I’m thankful for from my time as a student involved in that ministry is my introduction to many great hymns of the church through the Indelible Grace project, one of various efforts to revive hymn texts that have fallen out of use (or at least that are missing a generation of Christians) by pairing them with contemporary melodies.

Thankful as I am for that introduction, I’ve grown more critical of much of what has come out of Indelible Grace since I’ve been out of college. A lot of that has to do with treatments of hymns like “O Come and Mourn with Me Awhile,” whose new tune is major-key, syncopated, and altogether too peppy for its text.

Yet there’s something to the weird effect of singing those words with that tune, something that expresses the strangeness of Good Friday.

It’s a public holiday here in Berlin, so the streets are unusually quiet. We’ll have a worship service in a couple of hours, a simple affair with readings from Mark’s crucifixion account, songs centered on the Cross, and a brief homily. As I type, I can hear church bells tolling the hour of the Lord’s death. It’s a quiet holiday, a day where it’s easy to wallow in the hard things going on in our lives and those of our loved ones – and there’s no shortage of those, at least for us. It’s a day (along with Holy Saturday) that can feel dominated by that “sort of quietness” C.S. Lewis describes in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you… You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”

But we’re commemorating the only time it was ever like that. We’re not left with the misery of disappointed hopes, as the disciples were; we can’t really feel that nothing is ever going to happen again. It did. We are celebrating Good Friday in the Age of Easter. And that transforms what we’re doing. Can our mourning really be grief, since we know what was really happening on Golgotha that spring day?

It’s a good time to try to revive and cultivate our sensibility for solemnity, for that which is solempne, which Lewis writes about in his Preface to Paradise Lost (cited here): “the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary” yet with no suggestion of “gloom, oppression, or austerity.” Lewis says in that context, “Easter is solempne, Good Friday is not.” Here I have to differ with him. The dreadful day itself, of course – as experienced by those who stood by the Cross and laid their Master in the virgin tomb – was not solempne. There was no joy then. But Lewis’s words in the mouth of Aslan the risen Lion are too true to keep all the rest of our Good Fridays devoid of festal joy: “Death itself [started] working backwards.”

Jesus came to defeat death from the inside out, and he did. Death’s victory is gone, and not only now: death’s victory on the Cross is retroactively its defeat.

When we look to the Cross, we can now see what was really happening: not a disaster undone only by the emergency intervention of the Resurrection, but the undoing of all that kept us from the joy God intended for His creatures. The Man on the Cross is the hero sallying forth against the dragon: there’s only one way for this to end. The Suffering Servant is carrying our sins into the grave, to leave them there forever.

The writer to the Hebrews said this: “for the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, despising the shame.” We cannot but be humbled; there is nothing so sobering as to contemplate the cost of our sins, the cost of new creation, but this verse says something unfathomable: Jesus despised the shame of the cross – in a culture where nothing was more to be avoided than shame – in favor of promised joy. Joy weighed heavier on Jesus’ heart than all the world’s wickedness.

So yes, come and mourn with me, but let us mourn joyfully over the beautiful and terrible scene. Let us delight in the solemnity of the quiet day. Christ our Passover is sacrificed: let us keep the feast. Jesus our Lord is crucified!

-Ben