As we prepare to chow down on some fish and hot cross buns, and anticipate a whole lotta chocolate, it’s worth pondering, just why is Good Friday, Good Friday?
In this secular age, when the Easter holiday is regarded by many as just an extended long weekend, and “Easter” itself is increasingly dropped (at the same time as politicians and businesses fawn over Eid), fewer may be able to correctly identify the Christian origins of the holiday. Still, most people even in this age of Western civilisational decline know that Good Friday is the day of Jesus’ death by cruficixion.
Which might well beg the question: what’s so good about that? After all, even the Bible makes clear that Jesus’ death wasn’t much fun for him. While the Gospel accounts vary slightly, the common theme is that Jesus suffered.
Good?
One common account for the strange name of such a day is that it’s just a misspelling.
For instance, many believed that “Good” was an alternate spelling of “God”, just as our modern word “Goodbye” came from the phrase “God be with ye”.
But that one doesn’t hold up.
“The origin from God is out of the question” Professor Anatoly Liberman from the University of Minnesota told Slate.
Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer seconded this, also telling Slate, “None of the early examples in the Oxford English Dictionary imply that it started off as God’s rather than Good, so I don’t really see this as more than speculative etymology.”
If we look at the same names used applied to the day in other languages, they seem a lot closer to how such a terrible day would have been felt by its subject.
It’s important to know that Good Friday isn’t known as “Good” everywhere. There are different names for it all around the world. There is a largely held misconception that the German phrase for the holiday is “Gottes Freitag”, translating to “God’s Friday”, when it is actually Karfreitag, or “Sorrowful Friday”. In Russian, the phrase translates to “Passion Friday”.
That brings us, by the way, to another seeming linguistic puzzle: “the Passion”.
In modern English usage, we tend to ascribe “passion” to erotic feelings, but its proper use even in English, is “strong or powerful emotion”. One powerful emotion in particular, suffering, reflects its Latin origins. “Passion” derives from the Latin patior, meaning to “suffer, bear, endure” (the same root as patience).
So, the “Passion” refers to Jesus’ suffering on that “Friday when the sky turned black” (in the words of the old gospel song).
In Romance languages, though, the word translates to “Sacred Friday”. Holy, in other words.
In Old English, god meant “that which is good, a good thing”. But the OE god was pronounced with a long O. By the time of Middle English (from the Norman Conquest to the late 15th century), that had become “good”. Meaning, “holy, sacred”.
And so…
“The answer seems pretty clearly to be that it’s from good ‘holy’,” said Jesse Sheidlower, the president of the American Dialect Society to Slate. The Oxford English Dictionary additionally notes that there was once “Good Wednesday”, the Wednesday before Easter, which is now more commonly known as “Holy Wednesday”.
So, Good Friday is literally a Holy Day.
But that doesn’t mean that the normal usage of “good” doesn’t apply, either.
Despite the rather tragic occurrence of Jesus Christ dying on the cross, without this event, there would be nothing to save his people from sin, thus making the name appropriate for the occasion, despite appearing otherwise.
MSN
So, in the Christian worldview, the day of Jesus’ suffering and death was, ultimately, indeed good.
