Praise
It is Good Friday. The air is thick
with an expectant silence, the kind that precedes
a great unveiling, or perhaps,
a seismic, irreversible shift.
We stand here, in the shadow of the cross,
but the shadows themselves
are merely the proof of an unimaginable light.
History.
A clumsy compound word,
a concatenation of syllables that attempts
to hold the immense, untidy archive
of all that has ever been.
We trace the etymology, the shallow paths
of linguistic drift: historia, inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation.
But the modern ear, tuned to a different frequency,
hears a deeper resonance,
a deliberate, pointed meaning,
as though the chroniclers themselves
were divinely inspired punks
with a message hidden in plain sight.
His story.
Not exclusively, of course. Not the exclusionary grammar
of a single protagonist erasing all others.
It is not the tyrant’s account, or the conqueror’s ledger,
which, for too long, it was made to seem.
But the scaffolding is sound, the foundation true.
The deep time of human endeavour
the grinding of civilizations into dust,
the rise of empires, the sudden, quiet collapse
of a belief system no longer fit for purpose
is framed by an arc that bends, slowly, painfully,
toward justice, toward a singular, self-giving love.
This arc is His story.
The thread pulled taut through the beadwork of millennia.
The invisible, ineluctable narrative force.
He is the beginning and the end of the inquiry.
The telos that gives the past its meaning.
Today, the pivot point.
The story finds its climax,
not in triumph of arms,
not in the thunderous coronation of a king,
but in the scandal of a public execution.
A failure, by all worldly measure.
A man, naked, humiliated,
left to bake beneath the indifferent Mediterranean sun.
This is the great secret:
His Story is predicated on His defeat.
It is the moment where God
stops observing from the safe distance of the heavens,
and descends, fully, painfully,
into the absolute worst of the human experience.
He takes the sum total of our collective mistakes
the petty jealousies, the large-scale genocides,
the daily cowardice
and absorbs it.
The cross is the ultimate editing bay.
It cuts the past from its bitter future.
It redefines power as surrender.
It redefines victory as sacrifice.
Look at the weight of history hanging there:
The tribalism of the stone age,
the cold calculations of the Roman law,
the spiritual blindness of the religious elite.
All of it converges on this single, splintered piece of wood.
And in the silence that follows the cry, Tetelestai
“It is finished”
the story is suddenly, completely changed.
The debt is paid. The logic of an eye for an eye
is shattered by an act of gratuitous, radical generosity.
The old world is over.
The new history begins here.
When we speak of history,
we are sifting through the debris of human hubris.
Potsherds and fallen columns.
The brittle parchment of treaties broken before the ink dried.
The hollow stares of marble busts
that once represented men who thought they were gods.
But within this vast, melancholy archive,
the Christian - the one who listens to the name, His story
finds the enduring, unbreakable pattern: grace persists.
In the wreckage of the cities,
a small community gathers, sharing bread.
In the face of the state’s crushing authority,
a martyr whispers a prayer of forgiveness.
In the face of philosophical despair,
an illiterate fisherman preaches hope.
This is the continuation of His story.
Not the grand narrative written in steel and oil,
but the submerged, resilient truth
written in the soft tissue of human hearts.
It is the story of the persecuted, the marginalized,
the ones who keep the flame alive
in the long, uncertain night.
Praise is not mere ecstatic utterance.
It is an acknowledgment of reality.
It is naming the world as it truly is,
which is to say, as a gift.
Today, on Good Friday,
praise is the hardest, most necessary act.
It is looking at the brutality, the apparent waste,
and seeing the intentionality behind the wound.
Praise for the terrible necessity of the cross:
For the love that would not rest
until it had plumbed the depths of our suffering.
For the final, perfect empathy.
Praise for the broken narrative:
For the moment the predictable plot
the hero wins, the villain loses
is discarded for something far more complex,
more human, and ultimately, more divine:
the hero loses, and in doing so, saves everything.
Praise for the ongoing story:
For the historians of the world who continue to look,
to investigate, to refuse the easy lie.
They are, perhaps unknowingly,
His archivists. They catalogue the evidence
of the world’s desperate need,
the very need that was met on this dark afternoon.
The story is not over.
His story is still being written,
in every act of kindness,
in every resistance against despair,
in every breath drawn in the hopeful knowledge
that death itself has been subverted.
Good Friday is the solemn asterisk
at the bottom of the page of history.
It directs us to the footnote:
See Resurrection.
The story does not end here.
We stand in the pregnant pause.
The silence holds the promise of Sunday.
And the whole, terrible, magnificent story
is good.