What would it be like to hear, for the first time, the words: “Take this and eat; this is my body”?
If you had never encountered such language before, it would be destabilising. It would feel like a fracture in the order of things. Not only conceptually, but physically. Something in you would tighten, hesitate, recoil. Because when meaning ruptures, the body often feels it before the mind can name it.
This is one reason freedom can feel unsettling before it arrives as safety.
Not because freedom is harmful, but because the human soul grows accustomed to what is familiar, even when the familiar is wounded. We learn patterns of protection. We brace. We withdraw. We over-explain. We control what we can. These are not random habits. They are often ways of surviving fear, shame, instability, or disappointment. Over time, they stop feeling like strategies and start feeling like the self. That is why letting go can feel like loss.
When something in you begins to say, “This does not have to define you anymore,” it rarely feels like immediate liberation. It often feels disorienting. Because what is coming undone is not abstract. It is embodied. It lives in reflexes, expectations, and learned ways of navigating closeness, conflict, silence, and love.
What we are releasing may not be evil in itself. Much of it once protected us. But what once protected us can also imprison us when it becomes the only way we know how to live.
Here, Good Friday speaks to us.
On Good Friday, the Church does not give us resolution. It presents us with a broken body. It gives us the humiliation, exposure, and abandonment of the cross. It gives us the long, terrible spectacle of what human violence does when it is met not by greater violence, but by self-offering love.
Here we meet the suffering servant of Isaiah: despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, a servant bearing what is not his own. In the Christian reading of Isaiah, this reaches its fullest meaning in the Passion of Jesus Christ. Christ does not suffer merely as one more victim among victims, nor does he simply provide an image of endurance. He takes upon himself the burden of sin and its consequences. He enters the place of estrangement, violence, accusation, and shame, and he bears it without surrendering to its logic.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. – Isaiah 53:5
Something happens there that we cannot accomplish for ourselves. The crucified Christ does not merely illustrate transformation; he makes it possible. He bears what we cannot heal by our own effort alone. He interrupts the cycle not simply by absorbing violence, but by exposing and exhausting its claim to ultimate power.
Only from within that deeper theological claim can the psychological parallel be drawn rightly.
For many people, what binds them is not only conscious belief but embodied memory: habits of fear, over-accommodation, emotional guardedness, chronic self-protection. A person may know, intellectually, that they are safe, loved, or no longer under threat, and yet their body may still react as though the unseen bondage is still in force.
That is why freedom often feels strange to us at first.
The familiar can feel safer than the unfamiliarity of being safe. The known can seem more trustworthy than the unknown. A person can leave one form of bondage and still feel drawn back to its patterns simply because they are familiar. When a long-held defense begins to fall away, it may not feel like healing. The soul may register it as danger, and this is where the language of surrender requires great care.
Not every kind of surrender is holy. Not every act of letting go is freedom. Sometimes what people are told to “release” is not a burden, but their own voice, their own boundaries, their own dignity. What is being asked of them is passivity, silence, or a quiet consent to what diminishes them. This is not the kind of surrender we are being called into. It can become a way of justifying harm, or of staying in what quietly damages a person’s life.
Christian surrender is not the abandonment of the self to violence, but the offering of the self to God. The surrender of Christ is not passive, but an act of trust, a radical confidence in the God who does not abandon him.
Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. – Luke 23:46
So too, when we speak of surrender in human life, we should mean the relinquishing of false protections, false identities, and compulsive controls that prevent love from taking root. We should not mean consenting to degradation or calling harm holy.
If freedom is disorienting, true love in its purest form can be even more so.
Many people learn to associate love with demand, scrutiny, instability, or performance. They have learned to earn closeness rather than receive it. They have learned to scan, manage, and anticipate. And so when love appears in a different form, patient, steady, truthful, without manipulation, it may not at first feel recognisable. It may feel foreign.
But this is precisely where transformation begins to move from idea to embodiment. Not simply by thinking differently, but by learning, slowly, to receive what once felt impossible: care without control, presence without threat, intimacy without the loss of self.
Such learning is rarely dramatic. It happens in small acts of endurance and trust. Staying present instead of fleeing. Telling the truth instead of performing. Receiving kindness without immediately suspecting its hidden cost. Returning, again and again, to what is good even when it still feels unfamiliar.
This is not instant victory. It is retraining. Reordering. In Christian terms, it is one small register of sanctification: grace reaching not only our thoughts, but our reflexes; not only our beliefs, but our bodies.
This is why Good Friday matters.
Because Good Friday tells the truth about the cost of love, the depth of human disorder, and the terrible seriousness of sin. But it also tells the truth that what is handed over to God is not lost. In Christ, it is taken up into something larger. The cross is not the glorification of pain. It is the place where love goes to war with sin and death by refusing their terms.
So yes, letting go can feel like loss. It can feel like losing an identity, a defense, a familiar way of moving through the world. It can feel like standing in the silence after something has been stripped away, before anything new has taken shape. It can feel like Good Friday: unresolved, exposed, and without immediate consolation.
Whether you believe in the Scriptures literally or metaphorically, the Christian claim is that this is not emptiness for its own sake.
It is the severe mercy by which God loosens our grip on what cannot save us.
And so we do not rush past Good Friday. We stay with it long enough to see what it reveals: that surrender is not always defeat; that what dies is not always what is most true; that the body itself can become a place where grace slowly teaches us not to cling to what fear once made necessary.
Not yet Easter.
Not yet fullness.
Not yet the final word.
But already, in Christ, the logic of death has been broken.
And that is why what is surrendered to God is never merely lost.
It is judged, purified, and returned as new life.
