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Morning Devotion for Good Friday
April 18, 2025
Reading: Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 2:12-22
But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death;
considering him a friend, they pined away
and made a covenant with him,
because they are fit to belong to his company.
For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,
‘Short and sorrowful is our life,
and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end,
and no one has been known to return from Hades.
‘Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
he reproaches us for sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our training.
He professes to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
the very sight of him is a burden to us,
because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange.
We are considered by him as something base,
and he avoids our ways as unclean;
he calls the last end of the righteous happy,
and boasts that God is his father.
Let us see if his words are true,
and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
Let us test him with insult and torture,
so that we may find out how gentle he is,
and make trial of his forbearance.
Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected.’
Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray,
for their wickedness blinded them,
and they did not know the secret purposes of God,
nor hoped for the wages of holiness,
nor discerned the prize for blameless souls;
Meditation by Jeremy O’Neill
There is a comical song by the British musician Will Varley called “Talking Cat Blues.” The lyrics poke fun at the phenomenon of the early internet where people made videos of their pets doing amusing things, with the frequent title/refrain of “10 things cats will do that will blow your mind.” The song works through a narrative of humans making bad decisions, and the punch line comes at the end, as the world is descending into chaos. War is breaking out and the human desire for violence and power has taken over. As the worst side of humanity is shown, and people choose to reject love in favor of death, the cat speaks the final line: “This is the one thing human beings will do that will blow your mind.”
I often think about this line on Good Friday. Handing Jesus over to the cross is a choice I can’t wrap my head around making. It blows my mind that we would kill him after all that he taught us. And yet we do. And we continue to choose death over life, choose ourselves over others, and choose violence over relationship building.
On this most somber of days in the liturgical year, the daily office lectionary gives us a passage from the Wisdom of Solomon, an apocryphal book originally composed in Greek in Alexandria. This portion hypothesizes as to how a group of people it refers to as “the ungodly” act, and it provides a thoughtful abstraction of the events we remember today. Although the person of Jesus is not explicitly named, it is hard not to see the parallels between this literature and the Passion Narrative. I also appreciate the change in perspective; we don’t get much dialogue from the crowd in the Passion, other than their cruel insistence that Jesus be crucified.
There is a sinister nature to this passage which captures the conspiring nature of evil in the crucifixion story. The line “let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our action” is particularly powerful to me. So much of modern life is an attempt to make things more convenient or more actionable/productive. Jesus upends all of that, and people did view him as an inconvenience.
It is tempting to hear the Good Friday story and think that we would never do such a thing. We like to think that humanity has evolved, become more just, and our hardened hearts have become more open. But violence and the denial of humanity perpetuates even as we speak. For 103 years, the Episcopal Church has collected a Good Friday offering to raise awareness and funds for the Diocese of Jerusalem and the Middle East. On Palm Sunday this year, the Anglican run Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the last fully functional hospital in Gaza City was hit by an Israeli air strike. As much as we want to look at the violence of the Good Friday where Jesus was killed as a single event, we must remember that violence continues every day in this world, and consider the ways in which we are implicated.
It is tempting to try and distract ourselves from all that Good Friday is about. It is also tempting to look ahead to Easter without acknowledging the pain that they day holds. But we must look upon the violence of the cross and see humanity at its most wretched. Only then can we truly appreciate the reconciliation, the forgiveness, and the healing that is to come from the one who created us and the one who redeems us.
Prayer
Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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