I got caught up earlier today in the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’s Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus Christ, since this seems to be a good Friday to do so. This paragraph excerpt doesn’t even begin to do the book justice, but it gives a taste:
We … know how the story turns out, yet we neither rush to Easter nor, when we come to Easter, do we put Good Friday behind us as though it were a nightmare past. The risen Christ, and indeed Christ returning in glory to judge the living and the dead, is always the crucified Christ who bears the scars. It is finished but it is not over. The reality of salvation is definitively settled, but history continues to be cruciform, a way of the cross for pilgrims headed home. Salvation is “now” and “not yet”; it is a matter of certitude and a matter of seeing in a mirror dimly; it is a present possession and a hope to be worked out with fear and trembling.
I see that Death on a Friday Afternoon is available for Kindles, by the way. But it’s a book worth reading any day.