The Question We Carried Here
On Sunday, the city of Jerusalem asked a question.
The whole city was shaken, and the crowd asked, “Who is this?” In reply came a true but insufficient answer:
“This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee” (Matt 21:11).
The crowd thought they were asking about the man riding into their city on a donkey. But Jesus says,
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
The claim of Christian theology, therefore, is that to ask “Who is this?” about Jesus of Nazareth is to be asking even deeper, more fundamental questions: “Who is God? What is God like? Where do we find him, and what does he look like when we do?”
The whole of Holy Week is God’s answer to the crowd’s question and to humanity’s deeper questions about God, the world, and our place in it.
On Thursday night, the answer started to take shape. There’s a towel, a basin, a broken loaf, a poured cup, a love moving εἰς τέλος, toward its completion. Tonight, the answer arrives in full. And the answer is not what anyone expected.
The Broken Signposts
The account of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and death in John 18 and 19 is the most devastating scene in all of Scripture. What makes it devastating isn’t just Jesus’s suffering but also the fact that everything human beings have ever cared about — everything we know deep down truly matters — fails all at once. That failure, that brokenness so evident in every detail of the Passion narrative, is one reason this harrowing story continues to have such a powerful effect today, even after two thousand years. Even in our rationalist, modernist, post-Enlightenment world, and even outside the church, this story continues to haunt and captivate our imaginations.
In History and Eschatology, N.T. Wright discusses what he calls “vocational signposts”—seven features of human life that appear across every culture and every era, things we all recognize as important even when we can’t fully explain why. These broken signposts are justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships. We strive for all of them. We can’t live without them. And yet we cannot quite grasp them the way we feel we should. They are like broken signposts—pointing somewhere real but ultimately failing to deliver on their promise.
What I want us to see today is what happens to each of these signposts when we stand, or even better, when we kneel, at the foot of the cross.
Justice. We long for justice. We yearn for wrongs to be righted and for the innocent to be protected. We don’t need to teach children about fairness; they learn all on their own to say, “That’s not fair,” the moment they feel the world’s scales are out of balance. A desire for justice is built into all of us, and yet, not only is justice so often denied to those who need it most, but we’re not even sure what to do about it. Pilate examines Jesus and says plainly: “I find no guilt in him” (John 18:38). He says it twice. Everyone in that courtyard knows Jesus is innocent. And yet, Pilate washes his hands, and he gives the order anyway. The signpost of justice, bent and broken as it is, points to an innocent man dying on a Roman cross.
Beauty. We crave beauty. We see it in other people, in a piece of music that captures us, in a landscape that takes our breath away, especially as the sun rises over the horizon. Yet, not only does beauty fade, but we also struggle to define it. No matter how hard we try to grasp hold of it, to hold onto it and make it last, it eludes us. It escapes us. On Good Friday, the soldiers twist together a crown of thorns and place it on Jesus’ head. They dress him in a purple robe and strike him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” What should have been a beautiful coronation has instead become a grotesque parody. The signpost of beauty is shattered on the floor of Pilate’s Praetorium.
Freedom. Every human being knows what it is to chafe against bondage, against oppression, against addiction, against the forces that diminish and enslave. We fight for freedom. We die for it. And yet freedom is always more elusive than we expect, and one person’s freedom almost always comes at another’s cost. The Passover was Israel’s freedom festival. Pilate tries to use it to release Jesus, but the crowd chooses Barabbas instead — an insurrectionist, a man of violence — because they want freedom but only on their own terms. The signpost of freedom points to a Roman cross and a final Passover that claims the life of God’s only Son and the true Passover lamb.
Truth. We long for truth, for something real and solid that can be trusted. We all know it is better to deal in truth than in falsehood, and yet lying, deception, and half-truths come so easily to us. Thanks to our modern 24-hour news networks, we don’t even know what truth is anymore. It all depends on what you’re watching and what you’re reading online. And yet we still long for it. Even worse, when corporations and politicians can buy and sell the truth as they see fit, we see again and again how easily truth is swallowed whole by power and money. Pilate asks Jesus about truth, and Jesus tells him that everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice. Pilate’s response is the response of every empire and every corporation: “What is truth?” (John 18:38). On Good Friday, the signpost of truth collapses under the weight of imperial power.
Power. We long for those with power to exercise it wisely and for authority that protects rather than crushes. And yet, as we see again and again, power always corrupts. Jesus announced a kingdom that was not from this world, and he redefined power as service. And then the machinery of Rome ground him into the earth outside the city walls. The signpost of power points, apparently, to an imperial boot stomping on a human face.
Spirituality. We long for God. We long for something more than the material world can offer. Our culture tells us that the dome above the earth is sealed, and if there is something or someone we might call “God,” he is very far away from us and has nothing to do with the mechanical workings of our universe. And yet we all find that this space is haunted in ways our secular age cannot explain. For decades, centuries now, we have been told again and again that the entirety of human existence can be explained by natural sciences, natural phenomena. Many people, despite everything our culture says, still seek out spirituality in various forms, and yet even the richest spiritual life can find itself plunged into darkness. From the cross, Jesus cries: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46). The one in whom the disciples had experienced the very presence of God now feels utterly and terribly alone. Despite our longing, the signpost of spirituality leads, quite literally, to a dead end.
Relationships. We long for love. We long for connections with other people. Even the most introverted among us know that we are made for it. And yet our deepest relationships and most intimate relationships so often disappoint, fracture, and ultimately end. Judas betrayed Jesus. Peter has denied him three times before the night is out. The disciples have scattered. The one who, on Thursday night, loved his own εἰς τέλος — all the way to the end — finds himself on the cross utterly and entirely abandoned. The signpost of relationships shatters at the loneliness of a Roman cross.
The world is full of these broken signposts, and yet every broken signpost converges on the same place. Every human longing arrives right here at a Jewish man dying outside the city walls, mocked, forsaken, and buried in a borrowed tomb. If the crowd’s question on Sunday was really a question about who God is, then the cross looks like a devastating non-answer. It looks like silence. It looks like the end.
Who Is God?
There is no way to reason upward from the broken signposts of this world to the God revealed at Golgotha. You cannot start with justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, or love, reach for them with everything you have, and arrive at a crucified Jewish peasant as the answer. The trail of broken signposts, followed forward, will not lead you here. But when you stand at the foot of the cross and read the story backward, you discover that this is where our deepest longings were pointing all along. The signposts were not wrong. We were reading them in the wrong direction.
That is the claim of Good Friday. To make sense of the world, to make sense of ourselves, to make sense of the longings in our hearts that we all feel but can’t quite grasp, and to answer the questions “Who is this?” and “Who is God?”, we don’t start elsewhere and try to work our way up because that will never work. Instead, we start here, on our knees, in the horror and agony of Good Friday, seen most clearly in the coming light of Easter Sunday, and we say, “Here I find the answer to my deepest questions. Here I find the answer to my deepest longings. Here I find the God who loved me εἰς τέλος, to the very end.
So, “Who is this?” Who is this man who entered the city with great fanfare only to be crucified a few days later? He is the one in whom every broken signpost finds its fulfillment and its end.
He is the just one, condemned by an unjust world so that justice might finally be established. He is the beautiful one, crowned with thorns and robed in mockery, through whose wounds a beauty emerges that has been inspiring art, music, and poetry for two thousand years. He is the truly free one, who could have called down angels to defend him but chose the cross instead, purchasing for us a freedom no insurrectionist could ever win. He is the truth, standing before a governor who asks, “What is truth?” and cannot recognize it when it looks him in the eye. He is the one who redefines power as a towel, a basin, and a pair of nailed hands, laid down willingly. He is the one in whom heaven and earth meet, the place where every spiritual longing for God finally arrives. And he is the one who loved us, εἰς τέλος, all the way to the end, when every other broken relationship had failed, and every friend had fled. Every broken signpost in the world has been pointing, all along, to this man, on this cross, on this day.
The fullest self-revelation of God in all of human history is a Jewish man dying outside the city walls — the just one condemned unjustly, the beautiful one crowned with thorns, the free one nailed to a cross, the truth dismissed with a shrug, the servant crushed by power, the spiritual one feeling abandoned by God, the one who loved to the very end forsaken by everyone he loved. The cross is not the interruption of God’s plan. It is the fulfillment of that revelation. The cross is God’s plan, written in broken signposts across the whole of human experience and the whole of Israel’s history, and now standing in full and terrible light at Golgotha.
So we do not rush past the pain of the cross to get to the joy of Easter. We stay here, in the silence, in the agony, in the horror, because there is no resurrection without this death, no Easter morning without this evening, no answers without first sitting with the full weight of all our questions.
The trail of broken signposts has led us here, to the ultimate broken signpost, and here at last, as Jesus hangs in agony on a Roman cross, suspended between earth and heaven, the two are united forever, and God is fully and finally revealed.
τετέλεσται.
Amen.
Life Group Discussion Guide
Introductory Prayer
Heavenly Father, on days like Good Friday, we come to you with heavy hearts and honest questions. Thank you for the cross. Thank you for the love that did not stop, even when it cost everything. As we gather tonight, slow us down. Keep us from rushing past the weight of this day. Open our eyes to see clearly what happened at Golgotha, and let it do its work in us. Amen.
Ice Breaker
Think of something you wanted badly that finally arrived and still left you wanting more. A relationship, an achievement, a moment. What was it?
Questions
N.T. Wright identifies seven things every human being longs for across every culture and era: justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships. Which of these do you feel most acutely in your own life right now? Where does that longing show up for you?
We tend to start with our longings and reach upward toward God. Why doesn’t that work? What changes when you start at the cross and read backward?
Pilate could look truth in the face and ask, “What is truth?” Where do you see that same blindness today in the world or in yourself?
The cross doesn’t look like an answer. It looks like silence, a dead end, and a failure. How do you hold that tension, especially on a day like today, before Easter has arrived?
Why is the temptation to rush past Good Friday to get to Easter so strong? What do we lose if we give in to it?
What does it mean to you personally that the fullest self-revelation of God is not power or glory, but a man dying outside the city walls, abandoned by everyone he loved?
Life Application
This week, pay attention to the places in your life where a signpost feels broken: a relationship that is fracturing, a longing for justice that goes unanswered, a spiritual dryness you cannot explain. Do not rush to fix it or explain it away. Bring it to the cross and sit with the question: what if this longing, in its very brokenness, is pointing somewhere?
Key Takeaways
Our deepest longings for justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, God, and love are not mistakes. They are signposts.
Those signposts are broken. They point somewhere real but fail to deliver on their promise.
You cannot reason your way from the broken signposts of this world to the God revealed at Golgotha. The trail only makes sense read backward, from the cross outward.
The cross is not an interruption in God’s self-revelation. It is the fullest expression of it.
There is no Easter without Good Friday. Do not skip it.
Ending Prayer
Lord Jesus, you are the just one condemned unjustly, the beautiful one crowned with thorns, the free one who chose the cross, the truth dismissed with a shrug, the servant crushed by power, the one who felt forsaken and loved anyway. Every longing we carry was pointing to you all along. Give us eyes to see it. Give us the courage to stay here, in the weight of this Friday, before we run to Sunday. We pray in your name. Amen.