Maundy Thursday (Year 4, NL)

God is the encounter we can't control.

Peter doesn’t want to suffer. Who does?

The Brazilian activist was killed by the same world that killed Jesus—a world that can’t bear love.

Who were the people who watched Jesus' crucifixion?

They stand witness, watching in agony at his agony. 

John 18:1–19:42

Small deceptions work like a narcotic, making us feel nicely respectable. Especially in church.

There are many reasons to deny Jesus, and we all have one. 

The Gospel of John uses the word "truth" more than any other book in the Bible and way more than the other Gospels combined. Not only that, but many of the most-quoted verses in John, the ones that have shaped Christian discourse over the centuries, have been concerned with the question of truth.

The callousness of Pontius Pilate was legendary: if you could choose your judge, you did not want him. Jesus cannot choose.

I’ve only seen three dead bodies in my life. The first was when I was 12 years old and my grandfather died at age 69. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. At the funeral home, my sister was brave enough to reach out and touch my grandfather’s hand as it rested on his torso. Back in our seats, I asked her what his skin felt like. “Plastic,” she said.

Aristotle writes that we would never go to the theater to see terrible things happen to a good man through no fault of his. Yet here we gather, aching for a good man’s sorrows and turning to him to make sense of our own.

The readings for Good Friday conclude with tender and brave acts of love (John 19:38-42). Both Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are cautious—Joseph is a secret disciple of Jesus, and Nicodemus had come to Jesus in the night, perhaps with a hood over his head and looking over his shoulder the whole way. Yet these two hesitant men demonstrate courage.