On the first Easter week, Pilate, governor of Jerusalem, handed down a sentence that Jesus should die. He had nothing against Jesus of Nazareth. He wasn’t the one who hunted him down, arrested him at night, or hired Judas to betray him. In fact, Pilate tried multiple times to release Jesus. He told everyone Jesus was innocent and didn’t deserve the death sentence the crowd was shouting for.
But he still had Jesus crucified.
Continue reading Interrupted By JesusI hope you had a good celebration this Easter. There really is nothing better in the world to celebrate—the resurrection of Jesus changes everything. Here’s a short poem I wrote as I thought about what Easter means for my future:
This is the most unusual Easter weekend any of us have ever seen, and hopefully ever will. The sun is blazing where I live, but we can’t go out and we can’t even have church services to mark the most important day in the Christian calendar. This Easter Sunday will be different, to say the least. But I can’t stop thinking about Easter Saturday.
It’s the day we normally set aside for egg hunts and preparation for Sunday’s celebrations. It’s the day that even the gospels skim over, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The day between death and resurrection. The day when Jesus’ disciples were heartbroken and hopeless, even though they were only one day away from seeing the greatest victory the world has ever known.
Continue reading Don’t Skip Easter SaturdayNotre Dame burned yesterday.
I haven’t heard an official story as to why, but accident or arson, the result is the same: A beautiful landmark destroyed, and the world in mourning.
I’m in mourning, too, even though I’m not French, not Catholic, and have never even seen the Cathedral except in pictures. It’s still awful to think of more than eight centuries of history going up in smoke, awful to see a masterwork of our ancestors so terribly damaged, awful to see one of the irreplaceable treasures of Europe’s cultural inheritance consumed in ash and flame.
I do realise that Good Friday is actually a separate holiday from Christmas. But I also realise that if it hadn’t been for Good Friday, we’d have no reason to celebrate Jesus’ birth. Christmas is about how the same God we all tried to push away came down and invaded our world anyway, come to rescue us from the broken reality we created, come to give us life at the cost of his own. Even at Christmas, the shadow of the cross hangs over the manger, and the glory of Easter resurrection is just around the bend! So this Christmas, I submit to you that a poem about Good Friday is not out of season:
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