It happened fast. That is the first thing to understand about Friday. The speed of it. Mark records that Jesus was delivered to Pilate "straightway in the morning" (Mark 15:1), was crucified at "the third hour" — about 9:00 a.m. (Mark 15:25), and died at "the ninth hour" — about 3:00 p.m. (Mark 15:34). From arrest to death — a span of hours, not days. And in those hours, as the combined Gospel accounts record, the Son of God was hauled before Annas (John 18:13), then Caiaphas and the assembled Sanhedrin (Matthew 26:57), then the full council again at daybreak (Luke 22:66), then Pilate (Luke 23:1), then Herod (Luke 23:7), then back to Pilate (Luke 23:11) — interrogated, mocked, scourged, condemned, and executed. The most consequential event in the history of the universe was conducted with the procedural haste of men who wanted it over before the Sabbath began.
Thursday's post traced the long descent — from Master to servant to sacrifice to agony. Friday continues that descent to its absolute floor. But Friday has something Thursday did not. Thursday had the garden, the intimacy of suffering, the sweat of blood. Friday has something worse than physical torment, worse than the nails, worse even than the cross itself.
Friday has the silence of God.
The Hours Before the Cross
We will not linger on the trials. Not because they don't matter, but because what happened on the cross makes the trials look like a prologue. It is enough to say this: every institution that should have protected an innocent man — religious authority, civil government, the voice of the people — failed Him in sequence. The high priest rent his clothes and declared, "He hath spoken blasphemy" (Matthew 26:65), and the Sanhedrin condemned Him in a nighttime proceeding that, as Elder James E. Talmage documented in Jesus the Christ, violated multiple provisions of Jewish law — including the prohibition against capital trials at night, on the eve of a feast day, and without a second hearing on the following day. Pilate examined Him and declared publicly, "I, having examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching those things whereof ye accuse him" (Luke 23:14) — and then handed Him over to be crucified anyway. The crowd, offered a choice between Jesus and Barabbas — a man who "had committed murder in the insurrection" (Mark 15:7; see also Luke 23:18–19) — chose the murderer. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland put it with characteristic precision: "Pilate's freshly washed hands could not have been more stained or more unclean."
And then the scourging. Roman scourging was not a beating. The whip was made of leather cords with small pieces of metal or bone fastened to them. The condemned person was tied to a pillar and repeatedly whipped. Elder Bruce R. McConkie described the instrument as "a multithonged whip into whose leather strands sharp bones and cutting metals were woven" and noted that "many died from scourging alone" ("The Purifying Power of Gethsemane," April 1985 General Conference). Jesus survived — because He had not yet finished what He came to do.
What He Said from the Cross
Here is where Friday becomes something more than a chronicle of suffering. Here is where it becomes a revelation of character. Because even dying — even nailed to wood with His body broken open — Jesus kept speaking. And what He chose to say tells you everything you need to know about who He is.
His first words from the cross were not for Himself. They were for the men who had just driven iron through His hands: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). The Joseph Smith Translation clarifies that He was speaking specifically of the soldiers who crucified Him. They were following orders. They did not understand what they were destroying. And He asked His Father to release them from the weight of it.
To the thief dying beside Him who said, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom," Jesus answered: "Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). Even on the cross, He was still saving people. Still making promises. Still opening doors.
And then He looked down and saw His mother. Standing there. Watching her son die. And He said to her, "Woman, behold thy son!" and to John, "Behold thy mother!" (John 19:26–27). He was arranging for her care. In the last hours of His life, with the weight of all humanity's sin pressing down on Him, He was making sure His mother would not be alone.
Forgiveness. Salvation. Tenderness. These were the things He chose to say while dying. Even the cross could not stop Him from being who He was.
The Moment He Was Alone
And then came the moment that changed everything.
The Gospels record that from the sixth hour — noon — darkness covered the land until the ninth hour (Matthew 27:45; Mark 15:33). Three hours of midday darkness. The creation itself recoiling. And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).
This is the most devastating sentence in all of scripture. And we must be very careful with it.
Jesus was quoting Psalm 22:1 — a psalm of David that begins in anguish but ends in triumph: "For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard" (Psalm 22:24). Even in the most desolate moment of His existence, Jesus was reaching for scripture. Even stripped of comfort, He was reaching for a text that ends in victory. But the cry itself was not literary. It was not performative. It was real.
Elder Holland addressed this moment with a reverence that still stops me every time I read it. Speaking in his April 2009 general conference address, he said:
"I speak very carefully, even reverently, of what may have been the most difficult moment in all of this solitary journey to atonement. I speak of those final moments for which Jesus must have been prepared intellectually and physically but which He may not have fully anticipated emotionally and spiritually — that concluding descent into the paralyzing despair of divine withdrawal when He cries in ultimate loneliness, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'"
Then Elder Holland made a distinction that changes everything about how we understand this moment:
"With all the conviction of my soul I testify that He did please His Father perfectly and that a perfect Father did not forsake His Son in that hour. Indeed, it is my personal belief that in all of Christ's mortal ministry the Father may never have been closer to His Son than in these agonizing final moments of suffering."
The Father did not abandon His Son. But He withdrew, briefly, the comfort of His Spirit — the support of His personal presence. And He did it for a reason that reaches into the life of every person reading this:
"It was required, indeed it was central to the significance of the Atonement, that this perfect Son who had never spoken ill nor done wrong nor touched an unclean thing had to know how the rest of humankind — us, all of us — would feel when we did commit such sins. For His Atonement to be infinite and eternal, He had to feel what it was like to die not only physically but spiritually, to sense what it was like to have the divine Spirit withdraw, leaving one feeling totally, abjectly, hopelessly alone."
Read that again. The only person in the history of eternity who had never been separated from the Father — who had said, just hours before, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me" — chose to experience complete separation so that when you feel utterly abandoned by God, when the heavens seem sealed and the prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling and you wonder if anyone is listening at all, He can say to you with perfect honesty: I know. I have been exactly there. And I am telling you — the Father has not left. He is closer than you think.
The Veil
And then He died. John records that He said, "It is finished" (John 19:30), and bowed His head, and gave up the ghost. Luke adds one final word: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). Elder Holland saw the arc of these two statements with devastating clarity: the first — "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" — was the bottom. The last — "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" — was triumph. He called the Father "Father" again. The connection had been restored. "With faith in the God He knew was there, He could say in triumph, 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.'"
The word John uses for "finished" is tetelestai in Greek — a word that means not merely "it's over" but "it has been brought to its intended completion." The force of it is total: the work is done, nothing remains undone, the purpose has been fulfilled. The Joseph Smith Translation makes the declaration even more explicit: "Father, it is finished, thy will is done" (JST Matthew 27:54).
And then Matthew records what happened next: "And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent" (Matthew 27:51).
The veil of the temple — the massive curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple. That inner room symbolized the presence of God. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest alone passed through the veil and entered the Holy of Holies (see Leviticus 16; Hebrews 9:7). That barrier was torn. Not from the bottom up, as if by human hands. From the top to the bottom. God tore it.
On Monday of this week, Jesus had cleansed the temple — driven out the merchants who had turned the Court of the Gentiles into a marketplace, who had blocked the seekers from finding God. On Friday, God Himself finished what Jesus had started. He didn't just open a door into the Holy of Holies. He ripped the wall down. As Elder Patrick Kearon taught in his April 2024 general conference address: "The veil of the temple was rent in twain when Jesus died upon the cross, symbolising that access back to the presence of the Father had been ripped wide open — to all who will turn to Him, trust Him, cast their burdens on Him, and take His yoke upon them in a covenant bond."
The Father's plan, Elder Kearon said, "is not about roadblocks. It never was; it never will be."
What Friday Means
We call this day Good Friday, and the name has always felt like a contradiction. What is good about torture and death? What is good about watching the only perfect person who ever lived be destroyed by the very people He came to save?
This is what is good: He held on.
Elder Holland said it plainly: "But Jesus held on. He pressed on. The goodness in Him allowed faith to triumph even in a state of complete anguish. The trust He lived by told Him in spite of His feelings that divine compassion is never absent, that God is always faithful, that He never flees nor fails us."
He held on when every mortal support had fallen away. He held on when the disciples fled, when Peter denied, when the crowd chose Barabbas. He held on when the nails went in and the mockers shouted, "Come down from the cross!" He held on when the Father's Spirit withdrew and He hung in a darkness He had never known. He held on — and because He held on, "finally and mercifully, it was 'finished.'"
And then Elder Holland delivered the sentence that is the reason for this entire week, the reason for every post from Palm Sunday to this one:
"One of the great consolations of this Easter season is that because Jesus walked such a long, lonely path utterly alone, we do not have to do so."
That is what Friday means. He was alone so that you would never have to be. He was forsaken so that you would never be forsaken. He descended below all things so that no matter how far you fall, when you reach out, His hand is already there — scarred, steady, and reaching back.
Tomorrow is Saturday. The tomb will be sealed. The stone will be rolled into place. The silence will stretch through the longest day in history. But the veil is already torn. The debt is already paid. And Sunday is coming.
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