As Jesus hung upon a Roman cross, he forgave one of those with him and promised him a place in paradise. This challenges our tendency to think of terrorists as pure evil, unrepentant and undeserving of good will.

Holy Week is not a celebration of long ago events. It is the reliving of Christ's Passion and Resurrection in the present.

A statue of Jesus encased in a glass casket carried by men dressed as pall bearers march somberly ahead of a large group of mourning women holding candles; praying and singing dirges in Italian through the winding streets. This is Good Friday in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

My mother is in her last days of life. Dialysis has ended. We wait for the inevitable. On this holiest of weekends, we wait. We sit vigil, waiting for her to die, waiting for Jesus to become Christ, waiting for the women to find an empty tomb, waiting to give my mother to her eternal rest.

There is so much to consider and experience at the Cross. So much we cannot afford to miss. Unless we look long enough at the Cross, the Resurrection will never mean nearly as much to us as it did to Christ.

This morning, we awake, and it is still dark. But carried through the darkness on the lips of a woman who has seen and believed, comes a Word.

Easter's greatest trick is not that a body was resuscitated. Heck, any old medicine man can perform that trick, and they do in hospitals every day around the world. No, the trick at Easter is that this Jesus was so special that, even after all these years, we still remember him.

Contemporary, multi-sensory feats of technology have caused observers to overlook another medium of remembrance. From Michelangelo's Pietà to the Crucifixion by Salvador Dalí, analog sculptures illustrating Jesus' final moments also provide a way for people to experience this story of life and death that has influenced the development of both the ancient and modern worlds.

Jesus died on a Friday. Some women went to the cave where he was buried on Sunday morning and found the stone in the front of the tomb rolled away. Jesus was not dead but had risen from the grave. The greatest comeback in history had taken place!

Like Jesus, we thirst for God's healing, restoring presence in our own pain-wracked lives. Our souls are parched and dry for it. God willingly quenches it -- abundantly, fully, now and forever.

On this Good Friday, as on many before, I consider anew the full range of torture and humiliation to which Jesus of Nazareth was subjected, physical and sexual. The latter is so traumatizing for the Church that we have covered it up -- literally.

Since Muslims and Christians often find common ground in Jesus' teachings, I believe that a holy period focused on Jesus provides opportunities to reinforce the commonalities between our faiths. Georgetown University showed me the enormous potential for interfaith dialogue during Lent.

With the goal of healing antagonisms and closing the longstanding divide between Christianity and Judaism, I set out to restore the Jewish foundation of Christianity -- a foundation that Christianity stands on.

...

I peered into the Incarnation's beauty: Jesus is fully God and fully human. He didn't merely act like a human; he wasn't a human-like wraith. He was God living a genuinely human life, which means God himself begged for mercy on a dark night.

How is it that Jesus' death accomplishes the forgiveness of my sin? By what cosmic mechanism does that take place?

This argument assumes God can't transcend our own moral limitations. Just because we may cry for justice and vengeance when we are wronged doesn't mean God will.

In the weeks before Easter, during the traditional season of Lent, Christians fix their hearts on the death of Jesus Christ. They reflect upon what he endured because they believe that it was redemptive.

For Christians, this is one of the most important weeks of our liturgical calendar. This is the week that we should be contemplating what we never want to contemplate: death.

Death was more than something for him to endure, just so he could rise again. Jesus' execution forever writes an identity upon him, as indicated in the Gospels' accounts of his resurrection.

Why would God send Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb of God, dying for the sins of the world, instead of just destroying sin, or perhaps offering grace and forgiveness to the very ones created by God?

It is unreasonable to look for scientific evidence of God's existence. Whether there is or is not a creator who subsists completely outside of the universe cannot be proven or disproven.

Amid the great tensions, contradictions and reversals in their flight to the Promised Land, the Israelites glorified God. Liturgical singing in churches today glorifies Our Lord in the same way.

As we begin our religious observances this week, I hope that we will keep in mind the Maureens and Megans among us: dear to God even in death, but so deserving of a life of here on earth.

Atonement theology says, "Jesus died so we might live." It suggests that the torture and murder lamented this Friday is "good."