There’s a LinkedIn post making the rounds. A therapist writing to parents whose teenagers have gone quiet. Her framing is kind. You’re not trying to argue. You’re trying to help. But somehow everything turns into conflict.

She’s not wrong about what it feels like. She’s wrong about what’s driving it.

The post assumes the parent wants a relationship and is accidentally producing conflict through poor communication. Fix the communication, fix the relationship. It’s a comfortable diagnosis. It lets the parent off easy.

There is a persistent fantasy at the center of American Christian politics, and it goes something like this: if we could just get the right people into office, pass the right laws, win the right Supreme Court seats — we could build it. The good society. The godly nation. The shining city on a hill, assembled by hand.

The Book of Revelation has a direct answer to that fantasy. It is not what you might expect from a book full of dragons and bowls of wrath. The answer is architectural. The New Jerusalem doesn’t rise. It descends.

“I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2). The verb matters. It is not constructed. It is not voted into existence. It is not established by a conquering army or a supermajority. It is given — “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” It is a gift. And that changes everything about how we are supposed to think about power.

There are two charcoal fires in John’s Gospel. Most people only notice one.

The first is in the high priest’s courtyard, chapter 18. It is cold. The servants and officers have made a fire because it is cold, and Peter is standing there warming himself, and three times he says: I am not. I do not know the man. I am not one of them.

The second fire is in chapter 21, on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, after everything. After the cross, after the tomb, after the locked room appearances. Jesus has made a charcoal fire — the only other time John uses that specific word, anthrakia, in the whole Gospel — and he has bread, and he has fish, and he is waiting.

There’s a moment in John 20 that is so quiet it almost disappears.

The tomb is empty. Peter and the beloved disciple have come and gone — they “saw and believed,” the text says, and then went home. Back to wherever you go when the world has just been turned inside out and you don’t know what to do next. They went home.

Mary stayed.

I did this exercise years ago and I’ve never needed to redo it since. This is the reference article — the place I point people when the topic comes up, so I never have to reconstruct it from scratch again.

Let me be clear upfront: I’m not trying to convince your church to change anything. The odds of that are zero. Easter is Easter. Good Friday is Good Friday. The liturgical calendar is load-bearing infrastructure for too many institutions to move. This isn’t a crusade. It’s just the math.

And the math doesn’t support a Friday crucifixion.

Between the crucifixion and the resurrection, there is a full day. And Scripture refuses to skip it.

The women who loved Jesus spent it grinding spices, braiding grief, and waiting. They didn’t rush through it. They couldn’t. The law said rest.

We’ve often read that as an obstacle — as if the Sabbath were an inconvenient pause between Good Friday’s tragedy and Easter Sunday’s triumph. But what if it was something else entirely? What if the Sabbath, in that moment, was doing exactly what it was designed to do?

Christianity Today recently posted a Good Friday reflection titled “Good Friday’s Answers to Wounded Church Members.” The theology in the free portion is real — the Man of Sorrows bearing wounds alongside the wounded is not nothing. But the article is paywalled. And if there is any accountability in it for the people who did the wounding — any language about confessing to the person you hurt, confessing to the church, waiting in the discomfort of having confessed — that part costs money to read.

The wounded get the comfort for free. The reckoning, if it exists at all, is a premium feature.

I want to be careful about intent here. Maybe the accountability is in there, behind the paywall, and the editorial team simply led with what they thought would draw readers in. That happens. Publishing is hard. But regardless of intent, the structure produces something worth examining — because it mirrors a pattern the church has been running for decades. And it raises a question worth sitting with: who, exactly, is likely to pay for a subscription after reading a Good Friday piece about the church’s wounded? Someone who has been hurt and wants more comfort? Or someone who has done the hurting, who feels the weight of it, who reads the free portion and thinks — thank goodness, we weren’t implicated — and then pays to find out if there’s a path back?

A realtor on LinkedIn is filling up his minivan for $100 and has found a way to feel good about it: he drives a Tesla. Good for him. The post is friendly, even a little charming. “Makes you wish it came with a free drink or pizza slice.”

But here’s what the post doesn’t say, and what almost no one in this conversation ever says: for most drivers, a hundred dollar fill-up is not the tragedy it’s being sold as.

And our collective inability to do the math — or demand that our politicians do it — is exactly how we keep electing people who promise to fix a problem they’ve misrepresented to us.

Someone recently accused me of wanting to dismiss the Eastern Church entirely.

My offense was pointing out that the canon of saints is overwhelmingly male — and that this isn’t coincidence. It’s what you get when the institution that decides who counts as a saint has been, for most of Christian history, run exclusively by men. The outcome speaks for itself. You don’t need to establish intent when you have five hundred years of publication records.

Their counterargument: We don’t reject the Western church because of colonialism.

The rooster crowed.

That’s how the song ends. That’s how the gospel ends that scene. And it’s not just a detail about the hour. It’s the sound of a worldview breaking open.

Peter hadn’t simply lied to save his skin. He had, three times over, declared a theology. He knew what a Lord was supposed to be — and the man being led away in chains didn’t match it. So the denials weren’t just fear. They were confession. Every “I don’t know him” was also an “I know what a Lord looks like, and it’s not that.”

There is a confusion embedded in the name itself. Good Friday. As if death were the point. As if the cross were the gift. As if what we are celebrating — if that word even applies — is the killing of a man by an apparatus of imperial power and religious collaboration.

It is not.

Death is the enemy. Paul says so plainly: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). The whole arc of the New Testament runs against death, not toward it. Jesus doesn’t die because death is good. He dies because the machinery of human sin — state power, religious legitimacy, crowd psychology, bureaucratic cowardice — grinds up innocent people, and he walked straight into it rather than around it.

There is a thing we do when we are afraid. We ask for the map. We want to know the route, the timeline, the method. We want someone to tell us: here is exactly how this ends. Here is the morning that is coming. Here is the mechanism by which the suffering resolves.

And when no one will tell us — when the silence holds, when the answer doesn’t come — we decide that the silence means the story is not going to end well.

We conflate not knowing the how with not knowing the what. We mistake the absence of a timetable for the absence of a promise.

A LinkedIn post went modestly viral this week. It warned that people in emergencies are reaching for their phones instead of helping. It urged “responsible actions over passive observation.” It got a lot of 🙏 reactions and shares.

It was also wrong — or at least wrong enough to be worth correcting.

In 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment building in Queens. The story that spread was that dozens of neighbors heard her screams and did nothing. No one intervened. No one called the police. Later reporting showed the original account was exaggerated — fewer witnesses, more ambiguity. But the psychological research it inspired has been replicated dozens of times under controlled conditions. The phenomenon is real even if the founding story was messy.

One sermon can’t do everything. But it does choose what it will leave out.

I want to be fair about what happened at the Maundy Thursday service I attended, because it was led by a woman pastor — and we need more of those, not fewer. She preached well. The message was drawn straight from the opening of John 13: Jesus loves his people to the end. True. Grounded. Worth sitting with.

And the basins came out. The towels followed. People removed their shoes.

There is a kind of knowledge that only imagination can give you.

Not speculation. Not fantasy. Something more painful and more useful than either — the capacity to hold what could have happened alongside what did, and to feel the difference. Not abstractly. In your chest.

This is what grief does at its most honest. And this is what the dramatic monologue at the heart of this song asks Judas to do — not from the outside looking in, but from the wreckage, looking back at the fork in the road he didn’t take.

The clip circulated for days: a pastor at a campaign rally, Bible raised, declaring that God had anointed this candidate to restore Christian America. The crowd roared. The flags waved. And somewhere offscreen, the sword was already drawn.

There’s a version of Christian witness that looks like a clenched fist. It knows who the enemy is. It has scripture for the fight. It has prophets on the stage reading the maps and showing you where you are on heaven’s calendar. And it is absolutely certain that this moment — this political moment, this cultural conflict — is the one where the church must hold the line.

There is a version of Christianity that treats surrender like agreement.

As if the will of God and the will of the person happen to line up, and what looks like obedience is really just preference with a theological label on it. As if submission costs nothing because there was never any real resistance to overcome.

Gethsemane destroys that story.

There is a particular kind of comfort that comes from being in the room.

You know the people. You know the liturgy. You’ve been doing this long enough that the words come before the thought, the gesture before the intention. You reach for the bread because that’s what you do on Thursday nights. You drink the cup because you always have.

The disciples at the Last Supper weren’t strangers off the street. They were the inner circle — the men who had left everything, who had walked the roads, who had watched the miracles up close. If anyone had earned the right to feel secure at that table, it was them. And that’s exactly what makes the question so devastating.

We would have given him the credit.

That’s the thing worth saying first, before anything else. If Donald Trump had spent these years building the infrastructure of human flourishing — if his name were on the cooling towers, the community daycares, the Medicaid checks, the rockets going to the moon — we would have said: fine. Put your name on it. Gold letters if you want. Trump Care. Trump Space. The Tremendous Beautiful Big-Hearted Social Safety Net.

We don’t care about the name. We care about the thing.

I know a publisher who has built a catalog of books using AI assistance — cover art generated by machine, text modernized and edited with AI tools, production work that would have required a small team a decade ago now handled by one person and a subscription. That catalog has generated real income over the past few years. Not quit-your-day-job money. But real money, accumulating quietly while doing something else.

Roughly fifteen percent of that income has been going to a friend who is a working digital artist. Not because a platform required it. Not because a licensing agreement mandated it. Because every AI-generated cover is a commission that didn’t go to a human artist — and this particular human artist is in exactly the cohort that absorbed that displacement most directly. The money arrives in two installments. She didn’t know the first payment was half until the second one arrived.

This is not a policy proposal. It is a thing that is already happening. And it points toward something the current AI ethics debate has almost entirely missed.