Good Friday

I've heard the passion story read by one person, by a few people, and even acted out. But I've never heard it sung until tonight. Dietrich and I went to the evening Good Friday service after each of us had a short, but renewing, afternoon nap. I told him there would be a chance to touch the cross at the end of the service, but I did not prepare him for the story of Jesus' death to be sung by a narrator, Jesus, and the choir. Not that he needed much preparation for that. He simply took it in. I needed it, though. As the slow melody of the story unfolded I noticed words, phrases, that I have not heard before, or at least had not heard in a penetrating way. It reminded me of reading in Hebrew, when each word had to be carefully parsed before I could imagine its meaning and put it together with other words. A phrase would take minutes to collect, a chapter would be a hard day's work. But as I learned to read, the slowness of it changed how I read the stories and how I saw the ancient images. Where I had imagined a fuller understanding, or a hidden meaning, I found instead a new world that was not masked by the English translations I'd grown up on, but a world that I read too quickly to see. Tonight, the sung passion moved me in the same way. When it came to the part where Peter denies Jesus three times, I kept hearing, "he stood there, too, warming himself...he was there, keeping warm." Oh Peter, I am so quick to judge you, but tonight I stood there with you. How often I would rather just keep warm than either risk becoming cold by asking hard questions or dare becoming enraged in confronting ingrained realities. Peter stood there, denying the one whom, just the day earlier, he was falling before in adoration, the one who was now being led off to be killed. And it is Good Friday, and that is where I stand, and stay, for a while longer.