• The Lord is risen indeed!

    Alleluia! Something truly unprecedented has happened. God has become human: fully human and fully divine. I don’t know what that means, exactly. It’s unprecedented. Then, this God-man died. Men—well, people of all genders, and also all living things—die all the time. But God? It’s unprecedented. Now he’s back. And honestly? To me, the fact that

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  • Hopelessness and Holy Saturday

    God is dead. This year in particular, many of us don’t have to really stretch to put ourselves in the mindset of the profound hopelessness Jesus’ follwers must have been feeling the day after Jesus died. There was nothing to do but mourn, except maybe to hide just in case the Romans would come after

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  • A hill I would probably die on

    Did God abandon Jesus on the cross? My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? This saying of Jesus on the cross is referred to as his “cry of dereliction.” Dereliction, of course, means abandonment. Many Christians rightly find deep consolation in this: Jesus felt God-forsaken, as we often do. Therefore, he understands this

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  • Some unpolished thoughts on Maundy Thursday

    Ideally, I’d have written this post yesterday and posted it early today; but I’m late. On the plus side, I can share what I heard in tonight’s gospel lection while I was at church. Here’s the part that struck me: And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands,

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  • Whose is the kingdom, the power, and the glory?

    Holy Week is here again: that annual liturgical reminder of the horrors humans are capable of. We tame it—make it about the provision of a meek and mute divine sacrificial victim to atone for our personal sins. It’s such a familiar story. Our hymnals automatically flip themselves open to “All glory, laud, and honor” and

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