I’d like to say a little about a friend called Neil, whose surname is easy to pronounce but I never learned how. Focused, consistent, resolute, perhaps offcious. A Percy Weasley type, if you’ll pardon the reference. He’s older than me by a couple of years, and he used to serve on the Christian holiday camp I’ve helped to run for half my life.

He’s stricter and and a lot more conservative than me, and we differ significantly on a number of things, but I have great regard for his thorough and useful knowledge of the Bible. If a question came up about basically anything, he’d be able to say ‘ah yes, there’s a bit about that in 1 Colossians, I think it’s chapter 3’, and he’d be able to find it. He may not know the chapter and verse on everything, but he knew enough to locate it. We may often differ on how the passage was to be interpreted, as I think his excellent knowledge is married to an stubborn certainty on how some things ought to be taken. He’s not someone who could really be persuaded of anything, but I appreciate that he did listen to views before calmly and carefully refuting them. It’s a complicated situation, though at core I do agree with him that we shouldn’t soften the message of the Bible to make it blander and more palatable. Sometimes there is a hard truth.

When one day he announced he was leaving the holiday - for he had a life to lead - I thought, oh heck! How can we cope with no Neil! Nobody on team approached him for depth of Biblical knowledge. He was a leader and an asset. Realising we were losing him, I knew I needed to get some grasp on the entire Bible, and read the entire thing, and then read it again, and get beyond my dipping and tasting habits. I’ve never attained his skill, but that year I read the whole thing through, in chronological order, and then carried on, really, and now I know enough that people seem to think I have a good working knowledge of it, even if I actually know my knowledge is patchy and limited - and to be honest I’ve rested on my laurels and been neglectful of late, something I need to rectify. What I learnt from the departure of Neil is that sometimes you need to lose someone invaluable to make you dedicate yourself to filling a niche, and necessity causes us all to grow, at least a little

One Neil moment I particularly remember came in a worship session. We had just sung an upbeat and triumphant song called The Greatest Day in History, and Neil stood up to give a talk. ‘The Greatest Day in History’, he said ‘Good Friday’. What, I thought! Whaaat? Surely this song was about Easter Day, that triumph of life not Good Friday, that necessary defeat!

For reference, the lyrics include these statements:

“The greatest day in history / Death is beaten, You have rescued me”

“The empty cross, the empty grave, / Life eternal, You have won the day”

“And oh, happy day, happy day / You washed my sin away”

The empty grave seems to clue in Easter Sunday, and ‘Death is beaten’ seems to point to the resurrection, but under examination, ‘you washed my sin away’ is very much the thing that happened on Good Friday.

Flashback. Bretton Hall, 2004. I had been up all night writing an essay. I had a few hours before my morning lecture, and I decided to fill the time with a movie. On a whim, I’d asked my parents for a copy of Ben-Hur, that 1959 epic, since I remembered tiny flashes of it from a childhood viewing. It turned out to be a significant choice. I was utterly absorbed as I watched, and found myself tremendously affected by its strange focus on Jesus. He’s hardly in it, but Judah Ben-Hur’s travels bring him several times into contact with the Christ, though he doesn’t realise it. Towards the end, when Judah sees Jesus carrying his cross to be crucified - and he realises, this is the man who gave me water in the desert, so long ago, and saved my life — and he runs and tries to give Jesus water, but it’s snatched away before Jesus can drink - it seemed so unfair. And then he sees Jesus nailed to the cross, and Balthazar says ‘he takes upon himself the sins of the world’, it was a moment of revelation for me. I was finally seeing the crucifixion for what it was. Injustice. Unfair. Cruel and awful, and this man was suffering for me, to take away my sins, and there was nothing to be done to help him. He takes upon himself the sins of the world.

And then as he breathes his last, and the skies darken, and thunder cracks, and a storm blows and Jesus hangs dead on the cross, and his blood fills puddles and streams and flows and flows, Judah’s sick mother and sister, who had believed, and hoped for healing, but had seen their hope taken away to execution, suddenly find themselves cured of leprosy. I thought, no! I thought, why are they cured now, and not on Easter Sunday. Surely death on the cross is just a prelude to the greatest and glorious, the resurrection.

I was wrong, and I realised it, and a faith stirred in me more than any I had known, and it remains with me. Our burden of sin was lifted at the crucifixion. We were saved by the sacrifice, not by the resurrection. Easter Sunday isn’t the victory - though it demonstrates the victory over death and points to the world to come. Good Friday was the victory over the curse of sin, over death, over all curses of the world and the flesh. The price was paid.

Neil was spot on. The song conflated the two days, and was really about the greatest Bank Holiday Weekend in History. It doesn’t matter whether death itself was defeated on Good Friday or Easter Sunday. Sin, which brings death, was paid for with the most unfair and monstrous justice, voluntary self-sacrifice, on Good Friday. For years I wanted it to be the bleak, black and awful day of mourning and sorrow. But now I watch Ben-Hur each Good Friday, and to my mind Lent ends with the crucifixion. The darkest moment is where the sorrow stops.

It’s like crying. Your brain has so much sorrow or so much joy or so much of any given emotion chemical. You cry, overwhelmed, and your head poops the excess emotion chemicals out in your tears, and you feel so much better afterwards, with the imbalance expelled. Lent is like crying. Good Friday is like crying. It is the worst and most extreme part, but the sorrow is exported. The bubble bursts. The sin, every guilt, every regret, every cruelty or negligence or lie or hurt we have doled out, is laid on the cross to die there. The end is ghastly, but our sin dies with Jesus, and in that moment we are saved. There is a horror about the crucifixion, but once it’s done, there is bright sadness, and calm, and relief and freedom. Yes, we may feast on Sunday, but the fasting in our hearts should end today. Good Friday, goodbye Lent.