Christ is risen, my friends! Christ is risen! The only work that’s left for us to do is walk away from the stories of the empire, and commit together to being the people of Abel’s God, the community of Jesus, and to giving our fears over to his resurrection to be raised as joy.
We imagine the edge or the end guarded by dragons, but those are angels telling us to look around and see that this is not the end, and so this is not where we have to stay. In some ways, this invitation is just as fearsome as a mythical sea monster, it requires some boldness and at least a little bit of faith to say yes when the world says no.
Good Friday is a day of revolution. It is a revolution in which Jesus dies at the hands of oppression, then rises to new life to bring heaven to earth, not only in an afterlife but in the here and now. And Jesus invites us to join him as full, active participants in his saving work of bringing peace, justice, and hope.
Perhaps a challenge at the heart of the Maundy Thursday story to all of us is whether we might be humbler about the sources of evil and clearer about the commandment to love in all our relationships and dealings in this world.
Any week in the news could be Holy Week. Any week in the news we are just as likely to see the dastardly worst of ourselves on display in the larger machinations of our politics and in the crush of public and private cruelties. We must learn to look directly at these things, not to look away, and to find even there in the hurt and meanness, God present in the scrum.