Calling the day of the Crucifixion ‘Good’ Friday is a designation that is peculiar to the English language. In German, for example, it is called Karfreitag. The Kar part is an obsolete word, the ancestor of the English word care in the sense of cares and woes, and it meant mourning. So in German, it is Mourning Friday…And that is what the disciples did on that day—they mourned.. They thought all was lost
I have read that the word good used to have a secondary meaning of holy, but I cannot trace that back in my etymological dictionary. There are a number of cases in set phrases where the words God and good were switched around because of their similarity. One case was the phrase God be with you, which today is just good-bye. So perhaps Good Friday was originally God’s Friday. However, I think we call it Good Friday because, in pious retrospect, all that tragedy brought about the greatest good there could be
I can see virtue in either terminology. If we call it mourning Friday, as in German, we are facing reality head on, taking up the cross if you will, fully conscious that the Christian walk is seldom a walk in the park. But if we call it Good Friday, as in English, we are confessing the Christian hope that no tragedy—not even death—can overwhelm God’s providence, love, and grace. Either way seems fine to me
In Matthew 12:40, Jesus says that He will spend three days and three nights in the grave, as Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish. But if Jesus was crucified on Friday and rose on Sunday, He rose on the third day, but He only spent two nights in the grave. On the other hand, if we extend His stay in the tomb to include three nights, He would wind up rising on the fourth day
The answer is that the phrase ‘three days and three nights’ is an idiom that does not require there to be three nights
Jonah was swallowed by the fish during the daytime and was vomited out during the daytime (Jonah 1:17—2:10). In order for that to be three days, only two nights could have been involved. Yet it is called three days and three nights. Similarly, in Esther 4:16—5:1, there is a fast for ‘three days and three nights’ that begins on the first day and ends on the third day, which means only two nights were involved. Therefore, we must conclude that this is an idiom that observes that each of the days had a night associated with it
Now let’s go to the theater and sit in the same row. I’ll sit in Seat One next to the aisle, and you sit in Seat Three. I am and that it constituted ‘three days and three nights