Into Your Hand: Confronting Good Friday

This set of seven sermons follows the traditional church sequence of "The Seven Last Words of the Cross," utterances that the gospel narratives place on the lips of Jesus. These utterances are drawn from the several gospel narratives. In the liturgical life of the church, however, the sequence has a significance and staying power of its own quite apart from the gospel narratives in which the utterances are embedded. These sermons take seriously the faith voiced by Jesus in his context of wretched abuse by the Roman Empire. They attempt, moreover, to connect that reality of faith and abuse in our contemporary world of concentrated, ruthless power. The intent of such sermons on Good Friday is to replicate for us in our context what such an interface of faith and abuse must have been like. These sermons were preached last Good Friday in the preacher's home congregation.

"As I read each powerful meditation and perfectly connected psalm, I experienced the healing power that contact with big truth will always give. This was not the sentimentalized Good Friday 'seven last words' that I had grown up with, but a full body blow of contact with reality. Making use of the biblical scholarship and sharp insight that we have all come to expect from him, Walter Brueggemann then goes further. He reveals an amazing awareness of human suffering, family, relationships, despair, hard-won faith, and personal grief that the crucifixion accounts beautifully and subtly reveal."
--from the foreword by Richard Rohr

"What a gift that Walter Brueggemann's sermons on the seven last words are in print for others to read! His ability to connect Jesus's final words to the psalms and the emotional extremities of our lives made for a life-changing experience in our parish's Good Friday observance. We have returned to these sermons many times, opening our lives to the saving power of the crucified one."
--Roger Green, St. Timothy's Episcopal Church, Cincinnati, OH

"Here is Walter Brueggemann preaching us through Good Friday, psalms in one hand and Jesus's seven last words in the other. In hosting these words that lie at the crux of the gospel, Brueggemann unearths surprising news of life amidst the evidence of death. This truth-filled meditation will make a wondrous companion on the pilgrim's journey through Holy Week to Easter."
--Edwin Searcy, University Hill Congregation, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He is a prolific author, whose works include several volumes from Cascade Books: Praying the Psalms (2nd ed., 2007), Truth-Telling as Subversive Obedience (2011), Remember You Are Dust (2012), Embracing the Transformation (2013), and The Practice of Homefulness (2014).