In years past, I’ve leaned into the ways the Lenten and Easter season mirror seasonal cycles of death and rebirth. After all, Lent usually starts in the cold of winter and Easter comes when new flowers are beginning to bloom. Sometimes I’ve used Lent and Holy Week as a metaphorical framework for my own spiritual life. What do I need to let go of, what do I need to let die so that something new can be reborn or resurrected within me?

But this year, I’m not feeling especially metaphorical. We are living through a time when there is so much at stake and where there are so many very real, very nonmetaphorical threats to the people and ideals we hold dear.

This Holy week, I’ve been leaning into everything that is unique and particular about this story. And it is a unique story—painful and beautiful and strange and perhaps not natural at all. Christian theologians refer to this as the “scandal of particularity,” meaning the preposterous idea that the infinite became specific—revealing itself in a particular person, in a particular place, in a particular time. You don’t have to believe that it actually happened, or that it’s the only “true” religious story (I don’t) to see the lessons in this religious idea. Richard Rohr writes, “You can’t really love universals. It’s hard to love concepts, forces, or ideas. Ideology is just the ego wrapping itself around such abstractions. Love—God incarnate—always begins with particulars.”

So on Good Friday, I’m taking a break from thinking about metaphorical death, and am thinking about particular deaths, about modern accounts of unjust crucifixion: Our Unitarian ancestor James Reeb killed in Selma Alabama for following Dr. KIng’s call, Renee Good and Alex Pretti killed by Ice officer, our trans siblings killed for living as their truest selves, or the deaths of our unhoused neighbors because of our failures to protect human dignity and feed, house and clothe the poor.

Jesus did not die of natural causes at an old age and peacefully return to the dust of the earth. Jesus suffered a violent death at the hands of the Empire. On Good Friday, Jesus was nailed to a cross and executed by the state because his revolutionary message of love was good news for the poor and captive but a threat to those in power. He was abandoned by his friends, felt abandoned by his God and left thirsty and suffering. Good Friday tells a story of betrayal and grief, state sanctioned violence, and complacency and complicity from those who could have protested against it,

Not inevitable. Not natural, but certainly, painfully, familiar. I’ve often quoted German Theologian Dorothee Soelle who says that, “The cross is no theological invention, but the world’s answer given a thousand times over to attempts at liberation.” And we have no shortage of examples of this in our own time and place in history,

We know though, that Good Friday was not the end of the story. We know that Easter comes eventually. But here’s the thing about Easter. Just like crucifixion is not an inevitable death or part of the natural cycle of life, the resurrection was not a natural or expected act of rebirth, like a perennial flower blooming again in the spring. The resurrection was a shocking and scandalous act and a triumphantly defiant one. It was Jesus’s followers laughing in the face of imperial forces, saying that life is more powerful and abundant than the state’s tools of death. It was hopeful and powerful, but not inevitable. Proclaiming resurrection takes its own kind of work and courage. It requires a commitment to love and liberation that is so fierce it counteracts the fear and power of death. That, my friends, is not easy. Easter doesn’t let us off to the hook for doing the work to bring it about.

But today is still Good Friday. While we can live with what Henry David Thoreau called, “an infinite expectation of the dawn,” we still have to spend some time in the dark. History has shown us that cross is the world’s answer a thousand times over to attempts at liberation. I believe we can dream a different answer for the future, but we can only do that when we truly understand the reality we face. So on Good Friday, we need to look at suffering and violence straight on and not turn away. We need to understand the pain and death that result from a culture of individualism, scarcity, fear, and greed. We need to understand our own role in perpetuating that culture and discern our calling to courageously work against it.

Only then, when we really confront this pain, when we truly see the violent reality of crucifixion and understand it as something we can and must work against, will we have the passion and unwavering commitment of Easter people—of people who embrace the revolutionary idea that love is more powerful than the empire’s tools of death. So let us bare witness and lament today, so that come Sunday, we can do the defiant joyful work of proclaiming resurrection.

In faith,
Rev. Danielle