Even the Washington Post, like Slate below, finds itself proclaiming the Gospel today! The very stones are crying out. Read Michael Gerson’s Reasons For Good Friday, which begins with a discussion of a new book by Timothy Keller (a pastor in Manhattan who IS reaching postmodernists and not by making Christianity seem more shallow but by plunging into its richness). (The reference to the Christian poem that converted Simone Weil SHOULD have mentioned the poem: Love III by George Herbert.) But get this conclusion:
Good Friday calls attention to a final argument as to why the God of the philosophers, however useful, may not be enough. In the end, the problem of human suffering cannot be minimized or explained away — but in the Christian story, that suffering has been shared. Perhaps, in our own darkness, we need the imprisoned God, the scarred God, the shamed God, the despairing God. The poet Jane Kenyon grasped at this mystery of Good Friday:
The God of curved space, the dry
God, is not going to help us, but the son
whose blood spattered
the hem of his mother’s robe.
About Gene Veith
