What is Good about Good Friday?
Dallas Willard on the Importance of the Cross and the Purpose of Salvation
When he was a child, Dallas Willard could not understand why they called it Good Friday.
He knew the theology — at least as much as a boy in rural Missouri absorbs from church. He knew that God had laid upon Jesus “the iniquities and the wounds and the sicknesses of us all.” He knew Easter was coming. But still. How could you call good the day when the best person he had ever learned about was degraded, beaten, and nailed to a cross?
It’s a child’s question. And like most of the best theological questions, it’s one that adults have never really answered to their own satisfaction either.
In a sermon from February 2010, Willard returned to that childhood question. You can listen to the full sermon here.
He did not offer another rehearsal of the standard answers — substitution, satisfaction, the debt paid on our behalf. He started by naming how those answers had failed him. The boy who couldn’t understand why they called it good had grown into a philosopher who realized the church’s explanations often created as many problems as they solved.
The Problem with Our Theories
Willard was careful to distinguish between the fact of the atonement and the theories we generate to make it intelligible. The fact — that Christ suffered once for all, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God — is not in question. But our explanations often obscure it.
Willard named the trouble:
“It is often presented as if the heart of the atonement was that God just had a beating in Him and He took it out on Jesus.”
That version of the story never sat right with him — even as a child. It made God look like someone who never forgave, who “just found a way of paying himself off.” And it created a second problem Willard thought was just as serious: it made the cross feel finished. A transaction completed two thousand years ago with no bearing on how we live now.
“It troubled me that it looked like the whole thing was over and done with 2,000 years ago so that his death and the cross didn’t help me live my life now.”
This is the question that drives the rest of the sermon — and one I think many of us in pastoral ministry have not answered well for our people. Is the atonement something that lives today? Does the cross have a bearing on how I go about my Tuesday?
Willard’s answer is yes. But he gets there by walking us through what happened on that Friday before telling us why it’s good.
Human Goodness Does Not Succeed
Willard asked his listeners to consider who put Jesus on the cross — as a matter of history, not theology. His answer is striking:
“The Jewish people brought the highest moral teaching into human history that has ever been brought into it. The best. Very likely, at least by that time, Roman law was the best. And Roman administration was the best that had ever been seen. And it was exactly that that put Jesus on the cross.”
The best moral system and the best legal system humanity had produced — together they conspired to murder the Son of God. The entire human order came down on Jesus. From the highest political authority to the lowest household servant — Willard notes that even the servants, “the slappies,” became the slappers. Christ was so lowered that everyone in the hierarchy found someone beneath them, until they found him.
And then the line the whole sermon hangs on:
“Human goodness does not succeed. And when pushed, it always turns to doing what is wrong. Always. If that’s all you have is human goodness, you need a cross.”
Willard was no cynic about human beings. But he understood something many of us in pastoral ministry resist admitting: moral effort, even at its best, breaks down. It breaks down in our churches, in our own hearts, in the most careful systems of accountability and virtue we can build. The cross is God’s response to the fundamental inadequacy of human goodness — an inadequacy demonstrated with finality on Calvary.
For those of us who preach transformation — and we should — this is the ground we stand on. We preach the cross.
God Descended Deliberately
But Willard would not let us stop at the failure of human goodness. The cross is more than a tragedy. Jesus was more than a victim.
“You don’t want to think of Jesus as a victim. You want to go back and read the stories and see that he was playing Pilate and he was playing the high priest and the rest of the authorities like a great artist plays the piano.”
Like a great artist plays the piano. Pilate thought he was running the trial. The chief priests thought they were engineering an execution. Jesus — in concert with the Father and the Spirit — was orchestrating the entire event toward a purpose none of them could see. “No man takes my life from me,” Jesus said. “I lay down my life. I take it up again.”
This was a deliberate descent:
“God through his most precious possession, his son, descended to the lowest depths of human sin and suffering to bring the love and power of God there.”
God did whatever needed to be done to open the floodgates of his compassion upon the world. And he did it on purpose — as the definitive act of a God who refuses to let human brokenness have the last word.
The Door to Paradise Is the Cross
If the cross reveals the failure of human goodness, and if God descended into that failure on purpose — then what does the cross open?
Willard loved the thief on the cross. He saw in that story a revelation of what the cross accomplishes in the present tense. The thief recognized something in Jesus — from watching how he took the cross and how he hung upon it. And when he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” Jesus answered:
“This day. This day. The door to paradise is the cross. Paradise is accessible from the cross.”
A man being executed — in the act of dying — is in a position to take someone to paradise. He is operating from a reality the Roman guards could not see and Pilate could not adjudicate.
And then Willard: “Once you understand the brokenness of human goodness, then you begin to understand how the cross works as the doorway to paradise.”
You don’t get to the doorway by skipping the brokenness. You get there through it. The cross shows us the bankruptcy of our own adequacy — and then, in that place, opens the way to God.
The Adequacy of God in the Worst Place
From the doorway, Willard moved to what the cross looks like when it lives in a person. He turned to Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:10–11. Paul describes bearing about in his body “the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also can be seen in our mortal bodies.”
This is where Willard’s childhood question got its answer — and where he borrowed, with a grin, from Pat Benatar:
“What the cross tells me is — in the language of a popular song — God is saying to humanity, ‘Hit me with your best shot.’ And strangely enough, the cross is the best shot of the worst that human beings can do.”
God does not flinch at the cross. He absorbs. He takes the full force of human sin — religious and political and personal — and none of it is sufficient to defeat his purposes. And then:
“The cross, in revealing human inadequacy, reveals the adequacy of God in the worst situation that human beings could possibly endure.”
Good Friday is not a historical commemoration. The cross did not happen two thousand years ago and finish. It is a living principle — alive in every person who has come to the end of their own adequacy and found God’s adequacy there. Paul looked like someone who could not do what needed to be done. He couldn’t. That was the point. The dying of Jesus, carried about in his body, was the thing that made the life of Jesus visible.
Crucified to the World
Willard closed with Galatians 6:14 — the place where Good Friday’s goodness becomes personal.
Paul’s declaration: through the cross, “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Willard pressed on this. The cross crucified the world. And “there is to be no resurrection for it.”
By “the world” he meant what he always meant — the system of human arrangement that operates apart from God, the promises and powers that compete for our allegiance, the buttons and strings that move people who have nothing else.
“We don’t pull the strings and push the buttons that people who have only the world do, and it doesn’t pull our strings and push our buttons, because we are crucified unto it.”
The cross does not pull us out of life. It frees us within it. We can love without manipulation, serve without keeping score, minister without needing the outcomes to validate our efforts.
Good Friday is good because the cross shows us where we stand in reality — at the end of our own adequacy — and leads us to resurrection life with Christ, here and forever.
For Reflection
Willard asked: “Is atonement something that lives today and I can receive and it be a part of my life as I go about my business?” As you prepare to preach this Holy Week, how would you answer that for your people? Is the cross shaping your Monday, or does it stay on Sunday?
“What happened at the cross?” Willard asked it twice. His answer was that the best of human goodness broke down and turned to violence. Where are you trusting your own moral effort — your competence, your seriousness, your discipline — to do what only the cross can do?
“What got crucified at the cross?” The world did, Willard said. And there is to be no resurrection for it. What strings is the world still pulling in your ministry? What buttons does it still push?
Wonderful, thank you. I was memorizing Col 3 (as suggested by Dallas) and was asking God how I could be dead and still living my life here. This has been very helpful.