Nobody wants to hear the Passion story. I’ve heard of people trying to make Palm Sunday easier by moving the Passion story to the end of that service, with a pause before it so people can leave if they want. And then not many people come to Good Friday service. Nobody wants to spend a spring evening hearing the Passion story.
I know, it’s no fun, that old story of how that poor traveling preacher was betrayed by one of his friends, abandoned by almost all the others, and then murdered by a governor who was manipulated into it by envious men who were supposed to be people of faith. It’s a sad, sordid story and it’s no fun at all. But we need to do our best to take it in, all of it, everything that happened to Jesus and his friends on that Friday so long ago. We can’t look away and pretend it didn’t.
We can’t go straight from palms to Easter lilies without a long hard look at the crown of thorns.
This message is an excerpt from a Women of the ELCA blog by Audrey Novak Riley. Today is Good Friday. We remember Olavus Petri, priest, who died in 1552; Laurentius Petri, Bishop of Uppsala, who died in 1573; renewers of the church.
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