A Good Friday Song
Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada. With a beautiful hymn that is sung, I think almost every Good Friday! Sing it if you know it.
O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown;
O sacred Head, what glory, What bliss till now was Thine!
Yet, though despised and gory, I joy to call Thee mine!
It was Good Friday, and I was far away from home. I was visiting a, a friend’s church for the evening. Um the worship team up front was leading us all in a rousing happy rendition of “O Happy Day” – some people, you know, were standing waving their bulletins in time with the music; others were clapping, smiling, singing. A couple of parents in the back were bouncing their babies on their hips, and I, I don’t know how to describe it, but it did not feel like a Good Friday service.
I don’t say that snubbin’ my nose or pridefully, it’s just that I was raised in a little Reformed Episcopal Church that took Good Friday seriously. The service itself was somber, and there was a black cloth draped over the Communion table. And usually the lesson from the Gospel for Good Friday was from Mark Chapter 15 – you know that terrible, awful portion of Scripture that, well, it describes what the Roman soldiers did to Jesus behind the closed doors of that praetorium where they all gathered. They mocked Him; they spit on Him; they pulled out His beard; they struck Him with rods; and who knows what else they did to Him that the Bible is just too delicate to even mention. But it’s awful. And then it goes on to describe the horrors of the crucifixion of Christ. That, that is such a painful sacrifice. It’s such a painful portion of Scripture to read.
And maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that we stop for one day, just one day, and somberly, seriously consider the enormous, weighty price Jesus paid for our salvation. You know, after that Good Friday service, where they were singing “O Happy Day” and jumping up and down and clapping, somebody came up to me and said, “Joni, why do you want to be so somber on a night like this? Jesus didn’t stay on the cross – He arose. And that fact changes everything.”
You know, on the books he’s right. I mean really he’s right. But still, we have a year of Sundays to sing happy Scripture choruses and bright rousing hymns. But, on the church calendar we only have one day set aside to specifically and carefully ponder the gravity of Jesus’ wounds and scars. The prophet Isaiah prophetically described the scene at the cross in these graphic terms: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him; nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a Man of Sorrows, acquainted with suffering.” Yes, one glad, happy day we will enter our happy inheritance; we will shout and sing. But until then, we’ve got Good Friday, just one day in the year, to remind us all of what it cost our precious Savior to make that future wonderful bright day in heaven a possibility.
Come to my radio page. Let me know what you think. Let me know what you sing, at joniandfriends.org.
© Joni and Friends
Music: O Sacred Head, Now Wounded. Words: Bernard of Clairvaux. Music: Hans Leo Hassler 1153 Public Domain
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