2025 Lenten Meditations from All Saints’ Parishioners
GOOD FRIDAY MEDITATION
Reflecting on Holy Week and the Passion
Meditations for the Week of April 14-19
Luke 23:1-49
April 14: Meditation for Luke 23: 1-49
By Fifi Guest
It moves so fast! A brave parade, a sweet and sacred meal with beloved companions, a nighttime retreat for prayer. Then sudden reversal: betrayal, torture, public execution, and quick burial in a donated tomb. Our Passion liturgy moves quickly, too. Minutes after we brandish our palm fronds and sing the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, our lectors lead us through the hard part, and young people life that big cross and hand it from the rood beam.
Too much, too fast for me. It helps me to mark these seven days, to be in church each day of Holy Week, a least for a few minutes. Monday through Thursday there are our solemn/stirring noonday sermons, and then the liturgies for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. After all these years, every day has memories.
I remember the devotion and style of forty or so black women dressed all in white, anchoring the front pews in support of their pastor who was our Holy Week preacher. Another Holy Week, Barbara Taylor harrowed us with readings from the logbooks of death row guards in the days and hours before an execution.
I think about the way your faces look when you take part in Maundy Thursday foot washing, awkward and shy and very beautiful. Head Verger Mark Graham died on a Maundy Thursday. I remember that Barbara’s husband, Ed Taylor, made our Good Friday cross, and that it looks exactly like the cross in our crucifixion window. I remember watching the vergers scrub the altar floor one Holy Saturday, sleeves rolled up, in silence. I think about the boxes of bulletins and the bundled lilies waiting in the narthex on Holy Saturday. These are all, day by day, the way to Easter for me.
April 15: A Lenten Meditation on Luke 23:1-49
by Kevin Lyman
“He was crucified under Pontius Pilate...” This line from the Nicene Creed has always bothered me. It’s true, of course. However, it falls into that murky, dangerous territory of the truth and nothing but the truth…but not the whole truth. And it potentially obscures one of the most important elements of the Passion story and risks letting all of us off the hook. Because in the end, it wasn’t Pilate who killed Jesus; it was all of us. It was we who “rose as a body and brought Jesus before Pilate.”
As I reread Luke’s dramatic and beautifully written account of Jesus’s “trial” and crucifixion, I was stuck by the parallels with an earlier part of the story. It’s generally well known that Peter, as prophesied, denied Christ three times before the cock crowed. I had never noticed, however, the echo in Pilate attempting to spare Jesus’s life three times when the crowd was demanding his execution. Pilate “want[ed] to release Jesus” and on multiple occasions over the course of several days he opines that he can “find no basis for an accusation against this man,” imploring the people to allow him to release Jesus.
The crowd, though, is merciless. “They kept urgently demanding with loud shouts that he should be crucified, and their voices prevailed.” Those last four words fall like heavy stones on our hearts because we, not Pilate, sentenced Christ to death. Just to drive home the point, Luke makes clear that this wasn’t just some unruly mob: it was “the chief priests, the leaders, and the people.” It was the lawyers, bankers, doctors, advertising executives, and technology chiefs, alongside the politicians and religious leaders.
Peter was afraid for his life and betrayed Christ. Pilate succumbed to peer pressure and executed Jesus to appease the crowd. And yet this story offers us hope. Today we don’t revile Peter as a cowardly traitor. Thanks to God’s grace and forgiveness we know Peter as the first apostle to whom Christ appeared after the resurrection and “the rock” upon which the Christian church was founded. That same grace and forgiveness is available to us if we acknowledge our sins and ask for it.
April 16: A Lenten Meditation on Luke 23:1-49
By Clark Lemons
The scripture this week is Luke 23: 1-49. The story is beautiful—the trial and death of Jesus. It is suspenseful, tragic, and uplifting. Also, it's universal. I see these characters and their stories in my life, in history, in novels and poetry, and in the news-of-the-day.
First there’s Jesus, he’s the center, and without him there’s no story. He says very little, has very little power—and here he chooses to say little. There are other characters: Pilate, Herod, the Assembly of Elders (which I take as also “the chief priests and scribes”), the soldiers, the people. So, there are the rulers and those who enforce the rulers’ wishes, and, on the other hand Jesus, and then there are also “the people” who have a big say in what happens.
Pilate cares about what’s going on, Herod not so much (he’s superstitious, unstable). Pilate makes his decision opposed to the views of the religious leaders and opposed to the people’s. He says ok, “I’ll chastise him and release him.” But “they [all of those] cried out “Crucify him, Crucify him!” And they prevailed. Pilate delivered him to an overwhelming desire apparently beyond his power to control.
I know these characters. I know Jesus is no hero and never claims to be. I have no choice but to identify with "the people." I am not a secular nor a religious leader; that's not my heritage nor my identity. So I'm left to be with the people, yelling for Jesus to be crucified. Where else can I be?
I strayed beyond the 90% of chapter 23 that is our assigned reading to finish up the chapter's last 5 verses. Joseph of Arimathea (“a good and righteous man”) didn’t agree with the rulers or the people; he asked for Jesus' body and arranged for a proper burial. I don't see him as part of the rulers we've met (even though he's "a member of the council"), given his goodness, righteousness, and obvious devotion to Jesus. He's a new character.
And next in these last verses, the women who had come from Galilee with Jesus, who “saw how his body was laid,” in the Arimathean's tomb; they saw what they well knew would be Jesus' dead body and returned later with ointments and spices for the corpse. (Could they have been profiled, arrested, or jailed then? or today?) Joseph of Arimathea and the women at the tomb--both before and after the resurrection--play roles in this narrative though seemingly under the radars of the rulers and the people. Their actions, and the actions of these same women three days later, are part of why Jesus' story doesn't end in tragedy. And why it continues to be told today because, perhaps, of people like Joseph of Arimathea and these women.
April 17: A Lenten Meditation on Luke 23:1-49
By Charles Cork
Jesus didn't have to die on the cross. He could have kept to the hinterlands healing people. He could have stayed on the hills and valleys exhorting the people to love their Roman enemies, to turn the other cheek, to treat others as they wished to be treated, and to count on God to provide a future reward that showed no signs of coming. He might have been killed by a zealot for excessive Roman sympathies or simply died of old age. But the Romans would not have crucified him. As Paragons of Government Efficiency, why would they bother to strike the shepherd who kept the sheep herded?
They crucified him because of his overt nonviolent resistance against Rome and its collaborators. He proclaimed the reign of God throughout the countryside, rallied thousands, and set his transfigured face to go to Jerusalem, where priests serving at Rome's pleasure enjoyed the perks of ruling as long as they kept the people pacified through a veneer of divine service, while dispatching thugs to kill prophets and other troublemakers. Jesus entered Jerusalem as Zechariah said the messianic king would do, coming from the Mount of Olives as Zechariah said God would do, when they defeated the foreign occupiers. He taught every day in the Temple, displacing its approved scribes, announcing the good news of the reign of God, and attracting a sufficient following to protect him in daylight. He drove out a profit center from the Temple, uttered parables against the collaborating priests, urged people to render all things to God rather than Caesar, since all things are God's, and separated listeners from their allegiance to nation and Temple because both would soon be destroyed, as they were.
When collaborating priests accused Jesus of leading the nation from their rule, forbidding people from paying taxes to Caesar, representing himself as a messianic figure, and stirring up people by his teaching, they were right. Jesus was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, obedient not to them, but to God.
Good Friday, April 18: Meditation on the Passion Narrative | Luke 23:1-49
By Jenny McBride
Together with the incarnation that we celebrate at Christmas and the resurrection that we celebrate at Easter, the crucifixion is foundational to Christian faith. Because of this, there is so much one can say and should say theologically about the meaning of the cross. Yet, now, when I read the passion narrative about Jesus’s trial, sentencing, and execution, I can’t help but first see the human dimension, on account of accompanying Kelly Gissendaner, the only woman on Georgia’s death row, through her own execution in 2015. Kelly’s execution has helped me better understand the biblical account of the crucifixion in a visceral way: Experiencing the horror of her execution has helped me better understand the horror of Jesus’s own. And Jesus’s crucifixion has helped me better understand the depth of God’s solidarity with those who suffer, particularly those who suffer state violence in all its forms.
When I remember Kelly telling me days before her execution, “I’m not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying,” I think of Jesus sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, terrified as Kelly was. When I remember Kelly’s clemency hearing, which I and others spoke at in her absence, the day before her scheduled execution, I see in the interrogation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, Herod and Pilate’s own mockery and flippant dismissal of a child of God.
But most vividly I remember standing as the disciples did “at a distance, watching these things” in the Family Restaurant at the truck stop across from Jackson Prison, where a small handful of us who knew Kelly well gathered with her daughter for the night. When all the legal options had been exhausted and the United States Supreme Court denied her last appeal, Kelly called her lawyer’s cell phone one last time. Her daughter put her on speaker phone. We gathered around this little device, held in the palm of her hand, and heard Kelly sob. Sobbing with her, we told her that we loved her and that she wasn’t alone. But every word felt inadequate, until Cathy, a priest and close friend, shouted into the phone, “Kelly, you can do this. You can do this Kelly.” “Let no one rob you of your dignity; you are a beloved daughter of God,” her pen pal, the internationally renowned German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, wrote in his last letter. “Those who want to take your life really don’t know what they are doing. Forgive them; their future is dark. You are the truly free one.” Half an hour later, strapped to the cruciform gurney as one condemned and free, Kelly sang “Amazing Grace” until the poison took her life.
Emptied, exhausted, devoid of purpose, and profoundly dismayed, we, like the crowd, “returned home.” All of us who had gathered around Kelly scattered from each other, just as the disciples did, isolated by our own despair.
In a poem penned the next day on Facebook urging readers not to look away from the evil clearly on display, nor legitimate the horror by too quickly appealing to other-worldly comfort, a longtime death penalty abolitionist wrote, “I will not speak of resurrection for three days.”
A Poem for Holy Saturday, April 19, XIV Jesus is laid in the tomb
Malcolm Guite, used with permission
Here at the centre everything is still
Before the stir and movement of our grief
Which bears it’s pain with rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
Soothing his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.
