Good Friday
“Like the ancients, we know about ashes, and smoldering ruins, and collapse of dreams, and loss of treasure, and failed faith, and dislocation, and anxiety, and anger, and self-pity. For we have watched the certitudes and entitlements of our world evaporate.
Like the ancients, we are a mix of perpetrators, knowing that we have brought this on ourselves, and a mix of victims, assaulted by others who rage against us. Like the ancients, we weep in honesty at a world lost and the dread silence of your absence.
We know and keep busy in denial, but we know. Like the ancients, we refuse the ashes, and watch for newness. Like them, we ask, “Can these bones live?”
Like the ancients, we ask, “Is the hand of the Lord shortened, that the Lord cannot save?”
Like the ancients, we ask, “Will you at this time restore what was?”
And then we wait: We wait through the crackling of fire, and the smash of buildings, and the mounting body count, and the failed fabric of medicine and justice and education. We wait in a land of strangeness, but there we sing, songs of sadness, songs of absence, belatedly songs of praise, acts of hope, gestures of Easter, gifts you have yet to give.”
Walter Brueggemann. Prayers for a Privileged People (pp. 81-82). Kindle Edition.
Mankind IS a constant!
Come soon, Lord Jesus, come soon
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”[a] for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’[b] or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
It doesn’t matter whether you’re pre-Trib, Pre-Mil, A-Mil, “it will all pan out in the end”-Jesus will return and set things right. In the meantime, we watch and pray, doing what good we can for those who are hurting.
Dang! As I cut and paste this here, the Good Friday thread came up!
Linn! ! !
Amen
Some years back I heard a ‘theologian’ say that the great darkness that happened when Jesus died on the cross was probably a ‘solar eclipse’.
Not possible on Passover.
Jesus of Nazareth is the nexus of all time, of all space, and the spaces in between the spaces.
Of all created worlds, both seen and unseen.
He was and is the light of the world in a very literal sense, and when he breathed his last on that cross, light was the first to go.
That is good, MP!
Happy Easter!