Closed Minds Had Already Decided Jesus' Fate

There is an old spiritual that doesn’t really resolve. It just keeps asking the same question, over and over, in that slow and mournful way that makes you feel like you’re being searched:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.

I’ve sung that hymn more times than I can count. And every year, Good Friday comes around, and I find myself in the same place. Not with more answers, but with more questions.

I think I expected faith to work the other way. We expect spiritual maturity to look like more clarity. More certainty. A faith that gets cleaner and more confident the longer you walk in it. But the longer I follow Jesus, the more I find the opposite is true. The closer I get to the cross, the more incomprehensible it becomes. Not less. The cross doesn’t get easier to understand the more you love Jesus. It gets harder.

When he’s abstract, the theology is manageable. You can hold it at arm’s length and nod along. But when he’s real to you, when you’ve walked with him, when you’ve seen him move, when your faith is genuinely yours, then looking at the cross and saying my sins put him there lands with a weight that is almost unbearable. Not because I’m drowning in guilt, but because love that specific, that costly, that stubborn is something my human heart and mind cannot fully comprehend. The depth of what the cross represents, love and grace and mercy all colliding in one moment, is genuinely mysterious. And the further I grow in faith, the more I feel that mystery rather than less.

Growth in faith doesn’t shrink the mystery. It deepens it.

I keep thinking about the women. Not the disciples who scattered in the garden, though I understand them too. I mean the women who stayed. Mary Magdalene. Mary his mother. The others who stood at a distance and watched and could not leave. They had followed him, believed what he taught, built their lives around what they had seen him do. And now they stood watching him die. They weren’t skeptics at the cross. They were the ones who loved him most visibly. Who stayed when nearly everyone else had gone.

And then came Saturday. The Sabbath settled over Jerusalem and there was nothing to do but sit in it. All of it. Every word he had spoken, every miracle they had witnessed, every moment they had staked something on. Now silent. A stone rolled across it. No explanation. No messenger. Just grief and a sealed tomb and a day that had rules about what you could and couldn’t do, even in your sorrow.

I wonder if the doubt crept in somewhere in those hours. Not the shallow doubt of someone who never really believed. The deep, destabilizing doubt of someone who believed completely and now didn’t know what to do with what she had seen. The kind of doubt that lives right next to love and can’t be separated from it. He said he would rise. He said it. And now.

They didn’t go to the tomb on Sunday morning expecting a resurrection. They went to finish preparing a body. That is grief work. That is the tender, practical thing you do when hope feels finished, and all you have left is love with nowhere to go. They didn’t know. Not the way we know now, with two thousand years of Easter behind us.

They were in the not-knowing, and they came anyway.

Every year, Good Friday brings me back to this: He knew. He knew what it would cost. He knew my name and the full weight of every sin I would carry in my lifetime, and he went to that cross anyway. Not reluctantly. Not with conditions. With love so stubborn and specific that I genuinely cannot get my mind around it.

My sins put him there. I don’t say that to perform guilt. I say it because it is true, and because letting it be true, really letting it land, is the work of Good Friday. It is supposed to hurt a little. Not so we stay there, but so we understand what we are being loved through. The women at the cross understood this in their bodies before they could articulate it theologically. They stayed because they loved him. They came back because they couldn’t do otherwise. And somewhere in those long silent hours of Saturday, they held grief and doubt and love all at once, unable to resolve any of it.

I think that’s where a lot of us are, honestly. Not at the triumphant cross of Sunday morning hymnody. In the Saturday. In the silence after something we believed in has gone quiet. Carrying doubt that lives right next to faith and won’t be neatly separated from it. Not having it figured out isn’t a failure of faith. It might actually be a sign of it.

Good Friday doesn’t ask you to have the answers. It doesn’t ask you to rush to resurrection. That’s Sunday’s invitation. Today, it just asks you to stay. To let the weight of it be real. To sing the old song slowly and let yourself tremble a little.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

I was. In the way that matters most. And it causes me to tremble still.

May you find the courage to stay in Friday today. May the mystery of a love this costly be something you feel rather than just understand. And may the trembling be not something to escape, but something to stay inside, just for today.