“With the two young lovers dead, the heads of their houses, at last, find cause for recompense.” This line describes the end of a classic play with which you are likely familiar; and yet, even if you are able to identify it, the ending is substantially diminished by the lack of its whole. For this, and other reasons, most of us do not begin at the end of a story, nor do we appreciate spoilers even when it has been, “long enough.”

The Easter story has become that proverbial spoiler of Christian story. If you grew up within a Christian dominated culture, even if it was not the faith of your family, you likely knew the end of the story long before you read the first page, or any page for that matter; but the Easter story spoils “The Greatest Story” in more ways than one, especially for the modern reader.

Around Christmas time, you don’t have to go very far to find a clergyperson complaining that Easter is supposed to be the big Christian Holiday. The glitz and glamour of the early Winterfest surpassed the graveside celebration long ago. The same, however, can be said of Easter – that the incredible miracle of the resurrection from the dead put to shame the true central holiday of the faith: Good Friday.

Jacob Wright, Emory University, in 2023, released his book, “Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins,” offering up what I would call a vital reconsideration of Judeo-Christian thought. I should note here that Wright writes from a Jewish perspective. His thesis is that these stories survive thousands of years, not because they speak of power and success, but because they speak of enduring through failure and loss.

He’s not the first to make such an argument. In a passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, often read the Sunday before Easter, he claims that “Christ Jesus…emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human form…he humbled himself…to the point of death, even death on a cross.” For Israelites in the first century, death on a cross was a cursed way to die. For Paul, this weakness and frailty was a vital part of who Jesus was.

Paul, however, is still not the first to make such an argument. Fifteen books of the bible, what the Jewish tradition calls the Nevi’im, the Prophets, routinely decry the practices of the faith when it seeks success, achievement, wealth, and influence through rituals and traditions at a cost to the poor, the sick, and the weak among the people.

During the Reformation in the 16th Century, Martin Luther wrote the Heidelberg Disputation in which he contrasts a theology of glory – one that looks for God in success, power, wealth, and achievement – with a theology of the cross. At the cross, on Good Friday, we find Jesus beaten, bruised, bloodied, and battered. He is stripped of clothes, of dignity, of his capacity to move, and for the most part, even his capacity to speak where breathing is so difficult and painful. It’s here, Luther suggests, that we find the real God incarnate in the world – defeated and in utter weakness.

Four-hundred and twenty-six years later, Elie Wiesel would pen the story, Night, about his experience as a Jew during the Holocaust and being at Auschwitz, including these words:

“On that most horrible day, even among all those other bad days, when the child witnessed the hanging (yes!) of another child who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind him groan: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where He is? This is where—hanging here from the gallows.’ ”

In every generation, back to the beginning of time, humanity has found ways to look to power in its many forms – influence, wealth, physical or military might, success – and often said, “That is where we will find God,” despite the spiritual ones in their midst always reminding them that God stands with the weak and the suffering and that climbing the tower towards power, towards heaven, only moves us away from the divine.

It is only through the depth of understanding the God we encounter on Good Friday, weak and destroyed, that we can come to understand the God we meet on Easter morning. This is not the God of victory and success, but rather the God who is willing to endure with us every pain, agony, and shame, even if it is we who inflict it upon him, even to the point of death. Easter is the reminder that even after we have tortured and killed Jesus, he is still willing to walk with us.