Good Friday Devotional

This was originally published in the Ashes Alive 2024 Devotional.

Friday, March 29, 2024 Isaiah 52:13-53:12;  Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25 or Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9  •  John 18:1-19:42

Contributor: Rev. Ian Carr McPherson

Good Friday

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Queer people know the feeling of divine abandonment.

Churches that proclaim God’s love but exclude us. Families that promise unconditional love but reject us. Friends and lovers whose untimely loss undoes us. As the psalmist vividly describes in today’s reading, all human lives are marked by visceral, embodied sufferings. Though encircled by particular threats, queer people know the terror evoked by this text:

“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth dries up like a postherd; and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.”

Jesus himself could find no better expression of his physical and spiritual agony on the cross than the invocation of this passage. Christ’s embrace of this text is a radically vulnerable act. It is also a reminder that God is on the side of those who suffer, even (perhaps, especially) when in our suffering we decry God’s absence.

The good news for queer people this Good Friday is that God takes our suffering seriously; indeed, in Christ, God takes on our suffering as God’s own. It is a holy act to name our hurt. Like Jesus before us, and the psalmist before him, we can give voice to our pain even as we hold fast to a hope beyond agony’s reach.

This a hope inherited, the text reminds us. One rooted in the faithful witness of our queer ancestors whose very lives proclaim God’s love for us.

Even as the evils of homophobic and transphobic policies surround us, even if our bodies seem to betray and mock us, even when divine love seems to have abandoned us, we can cling to the stories of survival, resistance, and liberation of those who came before us. Even in the depth of our pain, as followers of Jesus we can lean on testimonies of God’s solidarity with those who suffer—a solidarity embodied ultimately by Christ on the cross. While Jesus recites the opening line of Psalm 22, his crucifixion bears witness to the tensions shot through the entire text, a tug of war between past accounts of God’s faithfulness, the embodied nature of present suffering, and the promise of liberation yet fulfilled.

The faith of our forebears, of the psalmist, and of Christ himself, does not ignore the harm we carry as queer people; yet neither does it allow such harm the final word in our story. As queer people living in the tensions of the cross, our lives bend ultimately toward the promise found in the final words of Psalm 22: “[F]uture generations will be told about the Lord and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.”

By God’s grace, this present suffering will not be our legacy. Our lives will be marked instead by our testimony to divine love and faithfulness, a legacy that will sustain our queer descendants and point them to the hope of God’s solidarity with us.