Growing up, I always found the name for this day to be odd. What's "good" about it? We have this agony and torture and death and burial and sadness: what's "good" about all that? At least as a younger person, those were my thoughts. As I attained more education I came to think along similar lines, but instead of thinking of the name as odd, I started to think of the name "Good Friday" as ironic. We have our almighty, omnipotent, omnipresent God, having taken human form, killed in a demeaning and inhuman manner. And the goodness is.....? This is all complicated by God's seeming silence.

This is a good day to consider God's silence in our lives. We have all experienced times where we think God has abandoned us. I recently stumbled upon a different way to think about God that is instructive to this train of thought. There is a theory called Disability Theology, which is an off-shoot of early Feminist Theology and Liberation Theology. Disability Theology was first propounded by Nancy Eisland in her book The Disabled God. I really can't do justice to this theory in two minutes, but in a nutshell Disability Theology takes a look at the spectrum of disabilities and wonders how God can relate to people with disabilities. If we believe in and follow this omnipotent and unlimited God, how can people with disabilities be made in the image of God?

Eisland began thinking about God in a wheelchair. Actually a "sit and puff" wheelchair is what she imagined: the kind Stephen Hawkings uses. Eisland believed that thinking about God in a wheelchair put God in solidarity with people who live with limits in their abilities. (God's breath in scripture....) If we think about limits, don't all of us have different kinds of limitations? If we think about disabilities as living within limits, well then we all have disabilities. How does a limitless God create and interact with such limited creatures?  Eisland points to Christ's physical scars and wounds he suffers today as God accepting limits, becoming limited. She also points to psychological wounds and their resulting limits. She points to Jesus' Passion: abandonment, the giving up of his life, the passing of the care for his mother to the disciple he loved. Eisland says these examples are all limiting the limitless.

And Jesus dies today and God is seemingly silent. Now there's a limitation. What's the "good" in that? The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor wrote about God's silence saying: Sometimes I think we do all the talking because we are afraid God won't. Or, conversely, that God will. Either way, staying preoccupied with our own words seems a safer bet than opening ourselves up either to God's silence or God's speech, both of which have the power to undo us. Maybe right there we can find some of the "good" in this "Good Friday".

Perhaps being uncomfortable thinking about a limited God, or a limitless God, allows us to accept the gift we are given today: the knowledge of God's love for us. We are gifted the knowledge that God understands our pain, our loss, our limitedness because God has experienced it firsthand in Jesus' mistreatment and death we remember today. With that understanding, we realize that we are never alone, whether or not we think God is silent in our lives, or if we believe that we are alone in our pain, our loss, our limitedness. That is proved false today, by Jesus on a cross. That silence Barbara Brown Taylor talks about that can scare us so much, or the words we might decipher if we chose to live in that silence and actually hear God's direction can both be difficult. Perhaps we will never be able to articulate what exactly we fear. The good in Good Friday comes down to: a limitless God chose to be limited by taking human form; how a limitless God chose death to show us a different way; our seeing our limitedness as an invitation to a love that is limitless. There is plenty of good in that silence we all can share.