William Sloan Coffin Jr. was serving as senior pastor at Riverside Church in New York City when his 24-year-old son Alex was killed in a car accident. After playing tennis on a rainy night, Alex loses control on a wet road and crashes into a ditch in South Boston.
Ten days after the funeral, Mr. Coffin gave a sermon in which he recalled the friendly rivalry he had with his son. His son always wanted to win, but now, in his son’s words, he beat him to the grave. While he thanked the church for its support, he noted that there was one well-meaning exception.
The night after the accident, a woman came to her sister’s house carrying a quiche. She hurried to the kitchen, shook her head and sighed. “I don’t understand God’s will at all.”
“Instantly,” Coffin said, “I got up and swarmed her, hot in pursuit. ‘I say it’s not going to happen, girl!'” He knew that this anger would serve him well. ”
Coffin later said that nothing upset him more than when intelligent people could not understand that God did not plan such tragedies. He made it clear from the pulpit:
“Do you think it was God’s will that Alex didn’t fix those lousy windshield wipers? Do you think he was probably speeding in the storm, or had a few too many ‘frosts’ earlier that evening? Do you think it was God’s will that there were no street lights or fences separating the road from Boston Harbor at that bend?”
After clearing the air, Coffin said plainly, “Love depends on its impossibility.” To the casual observer, love may seem transactional, a response to beauty, a reward for kindness, or a contract of mutual support.
But love, which exists only if it seems possible or obtainable, is just an exchange. True love begins where it’s not supposed to be, across the cracks of a cold harbor, a broken windshield, or a quiet haven. The cross does not show where God has retreated, but how far love goes.
At the funeral in Boston, Alex’s brother stood by the coffin and delivered the only eulogy he felt was honest: “You blew it, you blew it.” This was his way of rejecting false comforts.
Coffin said you should never say, “It’s God’s will” when someone dies. We don’t have enough knowledge to say that. He found solace in believing that Alex’s death was not God’s will.
When the waves came over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first to break. The coffin did not ease the pain. He knew the correct line: “Blessed are those who mourn,” but said that grief makes even true words feel unreal. The main emotion is a sense of loss. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Christianity does not explain suffering. I refuse to justify it. Good Friday is not a problem to be solved, but a truth to be faced.
Death is real. The cross is not a temporary illusion that Easter dispels. It reveals what will last. Love does not save by force. Even when it seems defeated, it continues to exist. Silence is not absence. The cross is not an answer but a protest.
“How do we bear the losses?” Coffin asked. We can become bitter or choose to help others bear their suffering. We often seek resurrection for our convenience, but complain that it is meaningless. Mr. Coffin concluded his sermon with these words:
“We live in a Good Friday world. Jesus cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'” yes—But at least, “My God, my God.” That’s how the psalm begins. That’s not the end. God is not absent from suffering, He is already present no matter what we face. ”
Coffin added that when Alex punched him in the grave, the finish line wasn’t Boston Harbor. When the lamp goes out, it’s because dawn has come. He sought solace in love that never dies and grace that is ever present.
We find peace when we discover a love that refuses to leave us in the wreckage of Boston Harbor.
notes and reading
Good Friday – This Friday, April 3rd
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”-The cry of negligence spoken by Jesus at the crucifixion. It quotes Psalm 22:1 and is recorded in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34.
The “good” in Good Friday comes from the Middle English word for “holy,” indicating that the day is sacred rather than a day of celebration. Liturgically, many traditions center around the cross as a transactional sacrifice for sin, and observe it through fasting and mourning.A view that stands in sharp contrast to the non-punitive “embrace” of the early church..
Even the West’s history of destruction mobilizes resistance against all expectations. For Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of Christians, Good Friday is not about sacrifice or suffering, but about love, rejecting the logic of violence and domination. In this reading, love becomes the most enduring form of resistance.
in antichristNietzsche asserts that Jesus “did not come to ‘save mankind,’ but to show men how they should live.” . . It’s not about beliefs, it’s about actions. ” (§35)
He famously claims in the same work (§39) that “the only true Christian died on the cross.” In Nietzsche’s view, the church took a life defined by radical, uncritical love and turned it into a religion of guilt, punishment, and resentment in the name of “redemption.”
Remarkably, this closely matches Origen’s vision of the crucifixion. in him sermon about joshuaThe third-century church fathers wrote that Christ on the cross stretched out his arms to “embrace the whole world” in the unity of love.
The cross here is God’s supreme gesture of salvation, not a transaction of punishment. The cross becomes, in Origen’s interpretation, an act of cosmic resistance against the violence of the empire that erected it.
> See David Bentley Hart, “Christ’s Rabble” commonweal (October 7, 2016); endless beauty (2003), Part I, §1; and sea door (2005), Hart argues that the cross is not an explanation of suffering, but a refusal to justify it. reference. origen, sermon about joshuaHomily 8 (c. 250 AD), trans. Barbara J. Bruce (2020).
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William Sloan Coffin Jr.-Legendary Yale University chaplain and peace activist whose moral imagination defined a generation of American liberal Protestants. I am grateful to him for being my first mentor and the person who started my own ministry.
> “Alex’s Death” (January 23, 1983) William Sloan Coffin’s SermonsVolume 2 (2008). -
Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ—Fleming Rutledge (2015). Rutledge, an Episcopal priest and scholar, traces the history of the crucifixion metaphor. She argues that no single theory can explain the meaning of the cross.
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The Crucifixion: The Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross―Martin Hengel (1977). German historian Hengel investigates how the “folly of the cross” was viewed by his contemporaries and shows why the idea of a crucified God was impossible for ancient minds.
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Crucifixion and modern literatureThe Passion story is increasingly being retold as a frame for contemporary experience, especially in novels. See theologian and critic F.W. Dillistone. A story of a novelist and passion (1960).
please save us
return of resurrection
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
