Good Friday 2026

33 And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.

34 And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "E'lo-i, E'lo-i, la'ma sabach-tha'ni?" which means, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

35 And some of the bystanders hearing it said, "Behold, he is calling Eli'jah."

36 And one ran and, filling a sponge full of vinegar, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, "Wait, let us see whether Eli'jah will come to take him down."

37 And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last.

38 And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

39 And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that he thus breathed his last, he said, "Truly this man was the Son of God!"

-Mark 15: 33-39

Thirty years ago now, I recall during Lent at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Athens, Georgia, attending a presentation by a parishioner, an emergency room physician, regarding his medical analysis of the Gospel depictions of Jesus's torture and death. The takeaways I still recall are that he was already so weak from his beatings that he died on the cross in an unusually short time, likely from asphyxiation caused by a combination of fluid filling his lungs and the physical inability to draw a breath while dangling there with his arms stretched over his head. John's account, weird in its own way like so much of that Gospel, supports this with its startling details about fluid streaming out of the corpse's side when he's pierced by a spear, and the breaking of the other condemned criminals' legs to hasten their death by asphyxiation. Jesus was apparently spared this final indignity because when they reached him, they found he was already dead.

What a strange, strange story to serve as the focal point of the most successful religion in the history of humanity. From a nativity tradition that stands as an odd mash-up of Hellenistic fables of gods impregnating women, to execution as an enemy of the state, to walking out of his tomb on Easter Sunday for a little downtime with his posse before stepping back through the curtain that stands between the material and the divine, one wouldn't have picked this narrative and the theology it represents as the foundation for empires over the last two millennia. One can certainly find pieces of what became Christianity in everything from Isaiah's suffering servant to Zoroastrian dualism to Philo's mashup of Judaic Neoplatonism, in later iterations of Stoicism and Islam (where Jesus remains a leading prophet). In that way, one could argue that there's nothing odd about a faith tradition that incorporates pieces of the cultural soup in which it evolved.

And yet. And yet.

We believe in a divine being who, not to commit heresy, was prone to sometimes cringeworthy temper tantrums, once killing a tree for the offense of failing to bear fruit in the early spring. He blew up at his disciples, rolled his eyes at their density (and yours, which was the point of the Gospel authors). He became impatient with the sick who kept bugging him for relief from their worldly suffering. He seemed surprised at the death of his best friend when he dallied in coming to the rescue, weeping at his mistake.

In sum, our "god" is very much a person, just like us. He ate. He slept. He was fully capable of being killed like any other person, as the disappointed audience witnessed on Golgotha that afternoon, murdered by the Roman government after being set up by the local Quislings who saw him as a threat to their accommodationist arrangement that was the source of their power, aping the Judaism they supposedly represented. In that way, the Christian tradition is the very antipode of every other religion on earth, built around an omnipotent philosopher-god-king.

Maybe that's the secret sauce to all of this. Jesus turns the tables (at one point literally), a deity (or an emissary of a deity--hell if I know?) for the Door Dash cyclists and the broken brown man babbling on the corner of Houston and Ludlow, the woman with three jobs and four roommates trying to scratch out a living, the farmer who can't pay for fertilizer in the present crisis. No matter what those on top these days would have you believe, Jesus might dine with them but he was never of them or for them.

This is a radical departure from the anthropological consensus that tells us religion arose as a means of legitimizing class structures and wealth inequality. Paul's Judaism certainly represented some of that, and it crept into his letters and therefore our tradition as well. Engrafting Paul's unfortunate but perhaps necessary shaping of Jesus's message to mass-market it across the Roman Empire, we take the teachings of this brilliant political criminal, and use them to throw a divine patina on brutal authoritarians, misogyny that suggests an almost willful ignorance of the central role women played in our origin story, and an at times gleeful attitude at times toward killing those outside our borders. (I'm looking at you, Dumb McNamara).

I'm babbling.

But maybe we should take a moment on this most solemn day of the church calendar, maybe we should look up from our labors and our laptops and ponder a little, babble a little, and treat this revelation of who or what God really is, and our relationship with the divine and each other, as worthy of our time and our attention.

Because if it's true--and your answer to that question is a matter of faith, and not anything I or anyone else can say or do--it's the most important question one can encounter in this life. And once one starts the journey of living into the answer, as Rilke put it, the world will never look the same again.