Good Friday

Here is my Good Friday meditation, written many years ago but some of you may not have seen it. I wrote this for a theology class at Luther Seminary in 1998 -- the assignment was to write a paper expressing our personal theology. Being a little bit of a rebel (!) I decided to do my personal theology in narrative form. Partly this was a way to avoid boredom (ever been bored writing college papers?) but partly it was also because I truly believe that a story often captures theology better than an essay. Essays make truth about facts and arguments. Knowledge is about analysis, sort of like getting to know a frog by taking it apart in a dissection tray. In narrative, truth is about the story. Knowledge is about action and character and passion, sort of like a ten year old kid wading around in a springtime ditch trying to catch frogs. Who knows the frog better -- the biology student or the ten year old? Hard to say. But the two ways of knowing are radically different.