Good Friday

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.

The decline of mainline Protestantism is clear. What's less clear is what the church should do about it.

As a second-generation Korean American, it is hard to identify stories from my past that can serve as reservoirs of understanding for my life now. “In you our ancestors trusted,” I could proclaim from those stories, “and you delivered them.”

David Carr rereads the familiar materials of the Bible in conversation with trauma theory. This opens the way for a fresh and suggestive interpretation.

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.

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

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.