Good Friday (Year 1, NL)

"Poetry invites you to have an experience. It doesn't want you to drift away into inattention. It wants to grab you."

How does a crowd turn from shouts of joy to cries of murder in such a short span?

In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, my dad couldn't sing national songs. The Nazis saw the church's Psalter, however, as innocuous. Little did they know.

Some people conflate the two words; others see them as an oxymoron. Since leaving the army, I've found that they're both right in some ways and wrong in others.

There is no denying that in today’s world a culture of loneliness and isolation plagues individuals of every age, race and socioeconomic status. Although the church provides a sacred community that may help combat this loneliness, even the most devout believers have, at one time or another, questioned how or even if God is present in their suffering.

The psalmist knows loneliness. Even the most faithful believers have anguished over the fear that somehow God is not listening to their cries.

At one end of Matthew, Jesus goes free. At the other, cruel, ritualized slaughter befalls him.

I once lived in a village in Germany that lay at the foot of a mountain covered in deep forest. A narrow farm separated the houses from the forest, and a cemetery occupied a piece of land part way up the mountain. Sometimes on my daily walks I stopped at the cemetery. It was the busiest place in town.

Maybe the real reason we show betrayers so little compassion is that we’re afraid there is some Judas chromosome within all of us.

The passion narrative is the story of a series of violations. Is it good for us to find our identity in it?