studies on Good Friday

In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi...

Our church has a large open field next to it, with a tall wooden cross in the middle– perhaps 15-feet high or so.  I love that cross. I’m always struck by its isolation, abrupt in the midst of land wi...

The other day I took a tumble. Fortunately, there were no witnesses. Now I’m walking with a limp. If ever there was a case of falling down it was Jesus. Some were saying He was the Son of God. They e...

In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci journeyed to China, bringing religious art to share the Christian story with those unfamiliar with it. The Chinese readily embraced images of t...

And so he was raised on a cross, and a title was fixed, indicating who it was who was being executed. Painful it is to say, but more terrible not to say. . . . He who suspended the earth is suspended,...

The cross of Jesus is the world’s supreme example of anguish, suffering and injustice, but it has nothing to do with tragedy as we experience it in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare—trag...

In George Bernard Shaw’s play about Joan of Arc , as Joan faces her execution by burning, she addresses those in power who have condemned her: “I will now go to the common people and find comfort in ...

The cross, Martin Luther wrote, was the devil’s mousetrap. The devil smelled cheese, and wham, felt steel. Thus, we see a little baby lying defenseless in a crib at Bethlehem, and a tortured man hangi...

The two thieves appear to be representatives of two opposing directions. One of them founders on the cross; the other is raised up by it. The story of the repentant thief does not teach that every sco...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the reality of what it means to “take up our cross” in our daily lives: Sometimes we suffer u...

Exposed to public view like slabs of meat hung from a market stall, troublesome slaves were nailed to crosses…past. No death was more excruciating, more contemptible, than crucifixion. To be hung nake...

The fact that a cross became the Christian symbol, and that Christians stubbornly refused, in spite of the ridicule, to discard it in favour of something less offensive, can have only one explanation....

I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick. He was a man about fifty-three years old who had lived a very active, useful, faithful, creative life. Actually, he was a social activist who had car...

It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate Son of God, that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life…my reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by h...

When the great theologian Jürgen Moltmann was sixteen years old in 1943, he was drafted into the German army and was soon captured by the Allied forces. He wound up in a prisoner of war camp in Scotla...

I remember growing up in the ’80s (yes, that dates me) when all kinds of fears and phobias seemed to be in the air—fear of the dark, snakes, scorpions, spiders. Someone in my own close circle was afra...

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in his classic study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity that the term stigma originated with the ancient Greeks, roughly during Jesus’ tim...

During the infamous Dreyfus trial in France, Jewish army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason, sparking a national scandal marked by anti-Semitism and injustice. Among Dreyfus...

In 1964 Peter Higgs wrote a paper entitled, “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,” which proposed the existence of a new fundamental particle of matter based solely upon mathematical dedu...

At the heart of the city of London is Charing Cross. All distances across the city are measured from its central point. Locals refer to it simply as “the cross.” One day a child became lost in the bus...

Since the seventh century, the Western church has observed the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday—the fortieth day before Easter, not counting Sundays. In addition to providing ample time for self-examina...

In the intro sequence of the beloved children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood , the first interior shot does not show the host. Instead, in the beat before Fred Rogers appears on the screen si...

My husband, Jeff, is an excellent driver. He has never had an accident, excepting two incidents in high school which hardly bear mentioning— Several years ago, I was driving across town to get to a sp...

Today is Holy Saturday, the day between the cross and the resurrection of Christ. It’s a day of reflection and waiting. It’s a time to consider further the reality of the cross so as to prepare for th...

New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N. T. Wright recalls being at a party once when someone decided to read a portion of the seventeenth-century Prayer Book for laughs. The Prayer Book includes ...

Frederick Buechner is a master of capturing the excitement of the moment of Palm Sunday. It’s a great reminder that the story itself is a great illustration! We call it Palm Sunday because maybe t...

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still becau...

I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished—I am terrified that, this year, it won’t happen; tha...

It was Easter Sunday and the pastor gathered the children at the front of the church to ask them about the meaning of Easter. The pastor was disappointed as he listened to the first response: “Easter ...

The Greek word for Easter, pascha, means “passage.” It evokes so many different passages for us: the Israelites’ passage from slavery to freedom, our own passage from sin to forgiveness, Jesus’ passag...