Good Friday: A Collect Reflection
Good Friday Begins with Asking God
Every collect makes a request. After all, the essential act of any prayer is asking. It may at first seem selfish—shouldn’t prayer be about giving thanks? Remember Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14). The Pharisee’s prayer was one of thanks; namely, he thanked God that he wasn’t like all those other sinners over there, especially that disgusting tax collector!
The tax collector’s prayer was a request: “God, be merciful to me!” Let’s notice the collect from the Book of Common Prayer:
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Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
—Book of Common Prayer (2019), p. 565
Asking always begins with admitting our insufficiencies. We abase ourselves as his children, which is precisely the posture God desires (as Jesus outlines in Matthew 7:7-11). Here is why the Psalms are always asking, even pleading—”hear me,” “save me,” “draw near to me,” etc.
“Behold This Your Family”
What does this Good Friday collect ask of God? It’s a stunningly simple request: “…behold this your family…” In this holy moment, this darkest of days, we ask God in his love and grace to see us, to hold us in his sight. The request is as essential as it is simple, because at the core of our being, isn’t this what we are looking for? We seek to be seen, to know, to belong, to hold. Also, notice that this request isn’t purely personal. The request is for all of us, the gathered and sanctified community of worshippers. We do not single ourselves out for special notice.
The Family of Jesus Christ
The simplicity of the request here belies a complex and wonderful truth. Only in Jesus’ saving work does God the Father empower us to esteem, identify, and adopt us as his family. As Paul says in Romans 8:12-17, it is our status as God’s adopted children that allows us to cry: “Abba, Father!” The collect rehearses the escalating awfulness of the path Christ took, emphasizing his willingness to allow those closest to him, his own disciples, to betray him, to deliver him to those who misunderstood and despised him, and to suffer the cruelty of the cross. The willingness of Christ, so poignantly expressed in Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:36-46; Mark 14:32-42; Luke 22:40-46), affirms the never-failing love of God.
A Plain Good Friday
There are few collectibles as plain and unadorned as this. There will be a season for overflowing rhetoric, abounding imagery, and grand requests. Its plainness fits this day. On Good Friday, we suspend for the briefest moments hopelessness in particular. We find ourselves in darkness, not certain if any sun shall ever rise, and so we pray not for eyes to see, but instead for God to see us. As we recall Jesus’ suffering upon the cross, we remember that God sees us because Christ was willing to let God forsake him.
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,
1 Peter 3:18-22
in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.
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