This Friday we call good

(continuing re: the Sacred Triduum): The second day is the Friday we so oddly call "good."  And the third day, the great Vigil of Resurrection conquest. Do not rush to the conquest. Stay a while with this day. Let your heart be broken by the unspeakably bad of this Friday we call good.  Some scholars speculate that "Good Friday" comes from "God's Friday," as "good-bye" was originally "God be by you." But it is just as odd that it should be called God's Friday, when it is the day we say good-bye to the glory of God. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

It seems that the more often I pick up this book, the less of it I can read before I want to write something in response to it!

Perhaps this quandary is as simple to understand as this: that there is no greater glory than to forsake one's own glory for the sole benefit of one's beloved. If so, and if there is also no glory greater than God's, then it is wholly appropriate that we consider this God's Friday, and appreciate that is good.  Indeed, if these things are both true - and I can only suggest that perhaps the first is not, though it seems to resonate within me - then this Good Friday is the fulfillment in time of God's very nature. In fact, I get chills when I observe how the mysteries of Jesus' divinity and humanity and of the Trinity, with which I struggle in the giant footsteps of so many great saints of God, somehow lose their tension and take on an eternal moment of fleeting clarity as I consider this concept.

This infamous day is, of course, the antithesis of good in terms of what we did to Christ, but it is the essence of good from the viewpoint of what he did for us.