Good Friday
For Lenten Season, members of the Juniper Formation Leadership Team and community have been sharing daily reflections through the Daily Ripple app and Substack. This week’s reflections are written by Dax Franklin-Hicks (he/him).
The Weight of the Moment
Mark 14:38
Stay awake and pray that you all may not come into the time of trial; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
“How do you not know how to help yet? I mean really!”
The urgency and anguish on my friend’s face filled the room. The question had not been asked in that moment. It did not need to be. It lives constantly in her body as a Black woman surrounded by white people who are still waking up to realities she has always known.
That same ache lives in the garden scene. A longing for companions who can remain awake to the weight of the moment.
I am not new to this work. I have been engaged in it, committed to it, shaped by it. Yet the question still probes me deeply. Even when we are doing the work, comfort and fatigue dulls our awareness. There are still moments when friends carry realities heavier than mine while I drift into a kind of sleep.
I wonder about the conversations I have missed. How many moments of truth have passed while I rested in comfort? How many friends have stood in their own gardens of anguish while I slept?
Staying awake is not a single decision. It is a practice of love for the sake of beloved community.
Where am I still learning how to stay awake for beloved community? What reality is Spirit awakening me to that I keep retreating from into comfort?
What Fear Reveals
Mark 14:50-52
All of them deserted [Jesus] and fled. A certain young man was following Jesus, with just a fine cloth on his naked flesh. They caught hold of him, but he forsook the fine cloth and ran off naked.
In Mark’s telling, everyone runs. Even the companions who had walked closest with Jesus scatter into the night. Fear has a way of unraveling the courage we thought we carried. The fleeing comes quickly in danger. I have been the one who fled.
Yet Mark pauses to notice someone else. Not a disciple whose name we know, but an unnamed young man trailing behind. We are told almost nothing about him. He may not belong to the circle. Jesus may not even know him. That anonymity feels intentional. It leaves room for us to step into the scene.
Why did he stay when the others ran?
Perhaps curiosity held him there. Perhaps hope did. Or perhaps he simply could not look away while someone he sensed carried the truth was being taken.
When the soldiers grab him, he slips from their grasp, leaving his cloth behind and fleeing naked. The exposure happens in the running. Fear strips away whatever coverings we thought protected us, revealing more of who we are than we ever meant to show.
Perhaps the invitation is not to pretend we are fearless, but to notice what fear reveals when our coverings fall away.
What coverings do I rely on for safety or belonging? When fear has stripped those away and left me feeling exposed, what might it mean to look back at those moments and listen for the Spirit there?
Testing Reveals
Mark 14:71
But [Peter] began to curse and swear, ‘I do not know this person [Jesus] you are talking about.
Peter’s denial unfolds in the backdrop of Jesus’s trial. Mark keeps moving us back and forth between two scenes happening at the same time. Inside, Jesus stands before the powers of the day. Outside, Peter waits in the courtyard, trying to remain unnoticed.
Jesus, when he breaks his silence, answers with quiet resolve. Peter answers with intensifying emotion.
When the moment demands an answer, Peter swears, “I do not know this person.”
Look at who names Peter as a follower of Jesus. It’s not a soldier or a judge, but an enslaved young girl in the courtyard, likely a minor. Someone with little social power recognizes what Peter hopes to hide. Truth sometimes arrives from voices we have been taught to overlook.
Peter once believed his devotion would hold. He could not imagine fear undoing it. Yet in the courtyard he discovers something about himself he did not know.
Mark places these scenes side by side as if to ask a question that reaches beyond Peter: When the moment of testing comes, who will we be revealed to be?
Who in my life has spoken a truth about me that I was not ready to hear, especially someone whose voice I might normally overlook? How might that moment still be shaping who I am becoming?
Hunger and Thirst
Isaiah 49:10
They shall not hunger nor shall they thirst, neither shall heat nor sun strike them down, for the one who mother-loves them shall lead them, and by springs of water shall guide them.
Maundy Thursday invites us to remember love practiced in the shadow of harm. At the table, Jesus kneels to wash feet and offers a commandment simple and costly: love one another.
This year the day arrives carrying many layers. Trans Day of Visibility that just past called forth joy and courage. At the same time, a Supreme Court decision opens the door again to the violence of conversion therapy against LGBTQIA+ youth. For me, and many others, the wound of conversion therapy is not an abstract idea. It lives in memory, embodied in our lives still today.
Into this moment, the promise of Isaiah rises like water in a dry place. God speaks to those worn down by systems that scorch and starve the soul. The Holy One who mother-loves the vulnerable does not abandon them.
Maundy Thursday asks what faithful love looks like now. Perhaps it is this: to stand close to those most at risk, to shelter truth when the heat rises, and to become living witnesses to the steadfast love that refuses to let them thirst.
Where am I being invited to embody steadfast love for those who are most vulnerable right now? When systems create thirst and harm, what does faithful love ask of me in this moment?
Good Friday
Mark 15:13-15
They shouted more [than before], ‘Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Why, for doing what evil?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Crucify him!’ So Pilate wanted to satiate the crowd, released Barrabas to them, then he handed Jesus over for flogging and to be crucified.
Good Friday confronts us with the kind of death Jesus dies. Crucifixion was not simply an act of cruelty. It was a political execution, reserved for those Rome believed threatened its order.
In Mark’s telling, the crowd’s cries grow louder. Pilate asks what crime has been committed, yet the demand only intensifies. Wanting to satisfy the crowd, he hands Jesus over.
Here the machinery of power becomes visible. Political authority, public pressure, and religious leadership converge in a moment that seals Jesus’s fate.
The one who proclaimed that the reign of God was near now stands accused as a rival king.
Good Friday reminds us that the execution of Jesus was meant to silence a life that unsettled systems built on domination. Yet the story also reveals something enduring. When love speaks truth to power, it may be met with resistance, but it also exposes the fragile foundations of injustice.
The death of Jesus shows us what systems are willing to do to protect themselves and what faithful witness is willing to endure.
When systems move to silence voices that challenge injustice, what helps me remain rooted in truth and love? Where is truth asking me not to turn away, even when the cost is great?