I spend a lot of time on the internet. We can call it a casualty of my research area, religious rhetoric on social media. We can also call it what it often is—a way of avoiding that and all my other work. But the great difficulty of the internet is how hard it is to know what time is truly wasted. I have spent many hours scrolling past horrible news, petty dramas, the endless stream of advertisements. I have—again, collateral damage to my dissertation topic—also spent many hours absorbing the anger and bitterness many feel toward the Church, or their particular branch of it. I read critiques of theologies those writers now see as abusive, some that grieve me, some that surprise me. Sometimes, I encounter fresh efforts at making meaning of the world and the Bible and the life of Jesus.
And I bring all these voices with me to church. Wherever you go, there you are, or so it is said, and the ideas and bits of information pinging around in my brain have never been willing to quiet at the sound of an organ prelude. In the Maundy Thursday service, I was busy thinking about penal substitutionary atonement and the former evangelicals on my timeline who have described how hurtful this view was, to be told as children that they are the cause of Jesus’ crucifixion, that he was murdered in their place to placate an angry God. In the Good Friday service, I thought of Josh Parks’ recent piece on the crucifixion of hope and the ways our eagerness to invoke Christ’s victory becomes itself an idol, shielding us from the suffering we find it inconvenient to acknowledge. I thought, as I often do these days, about how deeply weird the whole thing is. There’s so much that isn’t explained or included in the proffered account. Who was the unnamed bystander who offered Jesus sour wine? Where was Jesus’ body kept until Joseph of Arimathea struck that deal with Pilate? What happened to Simon the Cyrene after all this?
Even the familiar parts afford many interpretations. I am hearing the story differently this year, in part because of the morasses of the internet in which I spent so much of my precious time. This twitter thread offered me a new way to think about Peter, a scared young man—a kid, really—who has just seen his friend, his teacher, dragged away by the military personnel of an occupying power, who knew the violence visited on those who challenged the state, who is fighting panic and confusion when he says he does not know him. This instagram post reintroduced me to Judas after the crucifixion when—tortured by his mistake and its consequences, seeks counsel from religious leaders who offer no grace. This post, from a writer who no longer claims faith, reminded me that I, too, need liturgies that mark God’s absence.
I don’t know if I believe that Jesus’ suffering was necessary to satisfy the ransom demands of the Father. I don’t think I have to believe that to find the story compelling. Here’s what’s most powerful to me this Holy Saturday: that the people who loved Jesus most dearly, the people who knew him best—every one of them knows what it is like to have the bottom fall out of your life, to start a week with celebration and triumph and end it in terror, devastation, and bewilderment. They knew that part before they knew the resurrection. That Jesus bore Judas’s betrayal and still called him “friend.” When he was dying, he still offered comfort and hope to the guy strung up next to him. And he felt, in his last moments, forsaken. It seems less a story about wrath satisfied than one about a God who knows unimaginable pain, and a group of desperate people who don’t know how to follow such a strange Messiah.
Katie is a doctoral student in English and education at the University of Michigan. She loves the New York Times crossword puzzle, advice columns, oceans, and dogs of all kinds.
