We had just finished the fifth station. We were a peculiar assortment of strollers, clergy collars, t-shirts, and walking shoes all silently falling behind a wooden cross being carried through Canton.

There was just the slightest hush of a skid before the startling crunch of collision. Glancing up I scanned the line of cars stretching up the hill. Near the top I could just make out the final car, the windshield obscured by a buckled hood. One of the police escorts peeled off to the scene of the accident as we processed down toward the railroad tracks.

It was an unexpected collision, a rude intrusion upon the gloriously prim and peaceful spring day. One sudden collision and all the plans and expectations for the day are scattered like glass upon pavement. Time is swallowed up in accident reports and the inevitable tango between insurance companies. Money is shifted toward repairs—life is interrupted, heaved upside down, shoveled into unpleasant tasks. The heart leaps into action after its momentary pause, melting into the storm of emotion that so often accompanies the turmoil of life’s painful disruptions.

Collisions—never a romantic encounter, a peaceful resolution, or a gentle integration of differences—but rather a stark and abrupt unsettling of reality where an unexpected change delivers a baffling and a sometimes heartbreaking blow.

Good Friday is the holy collision of cosmic proportions. The Good Friday collision is one of dissonance; an unsettled shuddering of creation as the immortal enfleshed is fractured, spilling forth His life so that the dead might rise.  With the sigh of His final breath the breath of creation floods the world with hope that the third day might bring about resurrection.

It is a day where the immortal collides with death, victory hinges on defeat, and hope rolls in as dark Sabbath clouds gathers. It is a collision of worlds and a paradoxical collision of reality where strength, weakness, life, death, hope and despair tumble through the cosmic wave in which an ancient corruption is going through the painful process of rebirth.

Good Friday comes amidst pastel bunnies and sugary crosses, sunny skies and spring break fun. Good Friday temporarily and jarringly disrupts the comfortable narrative of the victorious to simply remind us of the brokenness where victory is won.

And so we wait, in solemn silence as much as one can on this side of the resurrection. We pause, we remember, we enter into the reality that God dwells and triumphs where worlds collide.